U.S. Transhumanist Party Chairman Gennady Stolyarov II was recently honored to be the first guest ever interviewed on the video channel Lev and Jules Break the Rules with Lev Polyakov and Jules Hamilton. Lev and Jules have produced this skillfully edited video of the conversation, with content references from the conversation inserted directly into the footage. For those who wish to explore broad questions related to technology, transhumanism, culture, economics, politics, philosophy, art, and even connections to popular films and computer games, this is the discussion to watch.

This video was originally posted here. It is mirrored on Mr. Stolyarov’s YouTube channel here.

Become a member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party for free, no matter where you reside. Fill out our free Membership Application Form here. It takes less than a minute!

Listen to Ryan O’Shea’s interview with U.S. Transhumanist Party Chairman Gennady Stolyarov II on the Future Grind podcast, where they discuss the state of Transhumanist politics. Mr. Stolyarov responds to some of the most detailed and well-researched questions that he has been presented with regarding contemporary political issues in the U.S. Transhumanist Party and transhumanist movement. The U.S. Transhumanist Party thanks Mr. O’Shea for enabling a thoughtful discussion that will be of interest to our listeners.

Become a member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party for free, no matter where you reside. Apply onlinehere in less than a minute.

Description by Ryan O’Shea: In this installment of the Future Grind podcast host Ryan O’Shea sits down with Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman of the US Transhumanist Party. Gennady took the reins of the Transhumanist Party when the organization’s founder, Zoltan Istvan, stepped down after his campaign for President in 2016. In addition to his work work with the Party, Gennady is a published author and composer, and he has contributed articles to the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, the Brighter Brains Institute, the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and many more. They discuss the current state of transhumanist politics, why Gennady believes that they are important in the first place, and how he feels that transhumanism can transcend socialism, libertarianism, and all other conventional ideologies.

Andrés Grases Interviews U.S. Transhumanist Party Chairman Gennady Stolyarov II on Transhumanism and the Transition to the Next Technological Era

Andrés Grases, the publisher of the Transhuman Plus website (http://transhumanplus.com/) interviews U.S. Transhumanist Party Chairman Gennady Stolyarov II at RAAD Fest 2018 in San Diego, CA, on September 23, 2018. During the course of this conversation, both the contemporary state of transhumanist politics and future directions are covered – along with the challenges to reforming the educational system, the need to create open access to academic works, the manner in which the transition toward the next era of technologies will occur, the meaning of transhumanism and its applications in the proximate future – including promising advances that we can expect to see during the next several years.

Interview with Liz Parrish, CEO of BioViva

Liz Parrish, CEO of BioViva

Preface

What is ageing? We can define ageing as a process of accumulation of the damage which is just a side-effect of normal metabolism. While researchers still poorly understand how metabolic processes cause damage accumulation, and how accumulated damage causes pathology, the damage itself — the structural difference between old tissue and young tissue — is categorized and understood pretty well. By repairing damage and restoring the previously undamaged — young — state of an organism, we can really rejuvenate it! Sounds very promising, and so it is. And for some types of damage (for example, for senescent cells), it is already proved to work!

Today in our virtual studio somewhere between Saint-Petersburg and Seattle, we meet a famous person! Elizabeth Parrish, CEO of BioViva, is a humanitarian, entrepreneur, innovator, and a leading voice for genetic cures. As a strong proponent of progress and education for the advancement of regenerative medicine modalities, she serves as a motivational speaker to the public at large for the life sciences. She is actively involved in international educational media outreach and is a founding member of the International Longevity Alliance (ILA). She is an affiliated member of the Complex Biological Systems Alliance (CBSA), which is a unique platform for Mensa-based, highly gifted persons who advance scientific discourse and discovery.

The mission of the CBSA is to further scientific understanding of biological complexity and the nature and origins of human disease. She is the founder of BioTrove Investments LLC and the BioTrove Podcasts, which is committed to offering a meaningful way for people to learn about and fund research in regenerative medicine.

Interview

Ariel Feinerman: Hello, Ms. Liz Parrish!

Liz Parrish: Hello, Ariel Feinerman!

Ariel Feinerman: Honestly, I have planned to offer you the idea of building the whole infrastructure for delivering therapies from manufacturers via clinics to the patients. Because we really need such an infrastructure! By the way, when I looked at BioViva web page, I could see that you already do that! Very nice surprise for all. Can you say, when and why you realised that making therapy is not enough and that to build a viable alternative to the usual regulatory path, we need such a platform and a whole parallel infrastructure?

Liz Parrish: I realized that quite early in my journey, but it took us a while to organize the right team, and our collaborations.

Ariel Feinerman: How optimistic are you that other companies will follow your way?

Liz Parrish: Very. We think that the anti-ageing and regenerative market with growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 8.4% over the next 5 years, and the total market valuation will reach approximately $500 billion by 2022. We have no doubt that this will encourage many companies all over the world to find innovative ways to capture market share by providing unprecedented value to customers. We hope those companies will use our platform and we can use our years of experience to assist them.

Ariel Feinerman: We already have many amazing results in the lab which can save human lives just now, but lack of funding and the over-regulated medical system don’t give them any chance to be in clinics in coming years. With the current pace of progress, they will already be outdated even before clinical trials. Do you think that translational research becomes the bottleneck?

Liz Parrish: Yes and no. Part of the the bench-to-bedside translational process needs to be expedited, whilst other parts need better oversight, and due-diligence, and yet other parts of the process need to be built from the ground up. BioViva is collaborating with biotech companies, researchers, clinicians, and regulators to put together all these pieces of the translational puzzle in the right place at the right time for the right set of patients to benefit.

Ariel Feinerman: What therapies do you offer now?

Liz Parrish: BioViva doesn’t offer any therapies. We partner with clinics, and other companies, including Integrated Health Systems (IHS), that offer patients treatments in various places in the world. Please contact IHS to receive their treatment details for patients.

Ariel Feinerman: As far as I remember, BioViva worked on telomerase earlier. Does your company work on any therapy now?

Liz Parrish: Our company partnered with Integrated Health Systems (IHS) earlier this year. Our partner company offers treatments in various parts of the world, while BioViva collects and analyses patient data.

Ariel Feinerman: What are your requirements for a bioengineering company that wishes to use your program? How do you ensure that their therapy is safe and effective?

Liz Parrish: We are not a body-hacking or bioengineering company. We collect data from treatments offered at clinics selected by our partner company mentioned above. IHS demands that the clinics conform to their countries’ regulations and medical personnel involved have adequate training, as well as high standards of hygiene and equipment. IHS only works with clinics that have an excellent reputation. US-trained doctors also regularly inspect clinics working for IHS to ensure that standards are maintained.

Ariel Feinerman: I mean can you say how your platform works?

Liz Parrish: Our company business is done by contract. Unfortunately I cannot elaborate on this point because it is not public information. Our goal, when setting up our platform, is to speed up regulation by getting as much early human data as possible that will hopefully make cutting-edge technologies available to those who need them as soon as possible. Ageing kills 100,000 people a day, so we cannot humanely afford to drag our feet; we must get treatments out as soon as they are available.

Ariel Feinerman: Investors usually fear uncertainty which follows companies who choose any alternative to the mainstream regulatory way. Is this improving? How do you solve this problem? Do you help bioengineering companies to look for loyal investors?

Liz Parrish: Any investment in new methods is risky. No risk, no gain. Medicine cannot progress if no one is prepared to take a risk. This applies as much to investors as to patients. Recently however we notice a trend in favour of investments that would have been considered high-risk five years ago but that today are regarded rather as medium-risk. The reason is the increase in computer capacity which in turn allows for more data and therefore for more data analysis. When it comes to data, more is synonymous with better. Lots of data allow investors to better predict the returns on their investments, so more money is invested in endeavours involving lots of data.

Ariel Feinerman: Dr. Aubrey de Grey has said: “I think the key thing we should be doing more of is making better use of those who choose to go abroad to get treated: we should make it as easy as possible for them to report on what treatment they received and how well it worked, any side-effects, etc., for a long time after the treatment, so that such information can be analysed and used to guide future research. The people who provide experimental therapies don’t have any incentive to gather such data themselves, so it usually never gets gathered.”

Do you or your partner clinics gather such information or follow your patients?

Liz Parrish: As I said above, BioViva’s task is the collection and treatment of data. This is what we do. We collect data before and at the time of the treatment, and then at various times after the therapy. We hope to gather much data from each patient we treat, and to gather much data from many, many patients. This is the only way to assess if a treatment works, whom it works for, after how long, how many times, etc.

Ariel Feinerman: Some people express concern that many therapies via medical tourism will be available only for small groups of people, because of lack of information, need to go abroad, lack of established clinic networks, and so on. What can you argue? How can you plan to make them more available?

Liz Parrish: All novel therapies are expensive because the R&D enabling them is still ongoing. The small group of people who can afford them are benefiting from what at the time of their treatment is cutting-edge medicine, but they are simultaneously funding the R&D that will assess these therapies, and later make them affordable to a larger number of people. This is just as true of organ transplants or surgical bypass, now routine but once unaffordable to most, as it is of gene therapy.

The fact that a treatment takes place abroad does not necessarily imply lack of information. All clinics proposed by IHS have websites with detailed information about their facilities. IHS is the clinical network, that hitherto has been lacking, which will connect patients needing treatment to clinics all over the world, one or two of which may have just the treatment a certain patient requires.

For sure, there is less information about the clinical results of some of the treatments they propose, and how could it be otherwise? Those treatments are pioneering, and therefore off the beaten track in novel territory. This novel territory requires patients to explore it, provide data for BioViva to analyse and in this way make the new treatments available to more people.

Ariel Feinerman: Thank you very much for your answers, hope to see you again!

Liz Parrish: Thanks you, it was my pleasure.

Ariel VA Feinerman is a researcher, author, and photographer, who believes that people should not die from diseases and ageing, and whose main goal is to improve human health and achieve immortality.

Message from Ariel VA Feinerman: If you like my work, any help will be appreciated!

Editor’s Note: The U.S. Transhumanist Party is pleased to publish this in-depth interview by Yuri Deigin of Dr. Aubrey de Grey, the U.S. Transhumanist Party’s Anti-Aging Advisor. Herein Dr. de Grey offers original, in-depth insights regarding the current state of research and public opinion regarding the pursuit of advances in rejuvenation biotechnology that will hopefully achieve significant life extension, one of the U.S. Transhumanist Party’s Core Ideals, within our lifetimes. This interview was originally published in the Russian language here. The English-language version was first published by one of the U.S. Transhumanist Party’s Allied Organizations, the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation (LEAF), here.

Note from the Life Extension Advocacy Foundation (LEAF): Today we have an interview with Dr. Aubrey de Grey from the SENS Research Foundation. This interview conducted by Yuri Deigin, CEO at Youthereum Genetics, was originally published in Russian language and he has kindly translated it into English so our audience can enjoy it, too.

Yuri: Aubrey, thank you very much for agreeing to this interview. Why don’t we dive right in? I am sure everybody asks you this: how and when did you become interested in aging, and when did you decide to make it your life’s mission to defeat it?

Aubrey de Grey: I became interested in aging and decided to work on it in my late 20s, so, in the early 1990s. The reason I became interested was because that was when I discovered that other biologists were almost all not interested in it. They did not think that aging was a particularly important or interesting question. I had always assumed, throughout my whole life, that aging was obviously the world’s most important problem. I thought that people who understood biology would be working on it really hard. Then, I discovered that wasn’t true and that hardly any biologists were working on it. The ones that were weren’t doing it very well, not very productively as far as I could see. I thought I’d better have a go myself, so I switched fields from my previous research area, which was artificial intelligence.

Yuri: By the way, do you think there are disproportionately many people from computer science in aging research these days?

Aubrey de Grey: There are a lot, and there are lots of people who are supporting it. Most of our supporters are, in one way or another, people from computer science or from mathematics, engineering, or physics. I think the reason why that has happened is actually very similar to the reason why I was able to make an important contribution to this field.

I think that people with that kind of background, that kind of training, find it much easier to understand how we should be thinking about aging: as an engineering problem. First of all, we must recognize that it is a problem, and then we must recognize that it is a problem that we could solve with technology. This is something that most people find very alien, very difficult to understand, but engineers seem to get it more easily.

Yuri: So do you think that people who don’t have such a background, this way of thinking, have a chance of understanding the importance of this problem, or are they better off letting people with an engineering mindset figure it out?

Aubrey de Grey: Well, of course, there is always an overlap. The reason I spend so much time doing interviews and running around the world giving talks is precisely in order to help people, for whom this is not obvious, to think about these things. For any new idea or any new way of thinking, there are always people who understand it first and who then communicate that knowledge to other people.

Yuri: Right. And you have been running around giving talks for a very long time, as I understand. It’s been, what, twenty years?

Aubrey de Grey: Well, at least 15 years that I’ve been doing a lot of it.

Yuri: So between the time in your twenties, when you realized that aging is not something that’s being adequately covered by biologists, and the time when you decided to have a go at it yourself, how many years have passed? And can you give a bit more background on when you founded SENS and what SENS is?

Aubrey de Grey: Sure! The year in which I switched fields properly is probably 1995. For the next five years, I was basically just learning. I was going to all the conferences, getting to know the right people, leaders in the field. Learning a lot of what was known and doing a huge amount of reading, of course. The big breakthrough came in the summer of 2000 when I realized that comprehensive damage repair was a much more promising option then what people had been doing before. Since then, it has been a matter of persuading people of that.

There were a few years when I was just ignored and people thought I was crazy and didn’t think I made any sense. Then, gradually, people realized that what I was saying was not necessarily crazy. Some people found it threatening, so in the mid-2000s, I had a fair amount of battles to fight within academia. That’s normal; that’s what happens with any radical new idea that is actually right, so that happened for a while. This decade, it’s been rather easier. We founded the SENS Foundation; we’ve started getting enough donations into the SENS Foundation to be able to do our own research, both within our own facilities as well as funding research at universities and institutes. Gradually, this research had moved far along enough that we could publish initial results. Over the past two or three years, we’ve been able to spin off a bunch of companies that we have transferred technology to so that they can actually attract money from investors.

There are, of course, an awful lot of people out there who believe in what we are doing, but they fundamentally don’t like charities; they don’t like to give money away. They have been waiting for the point when these projects move far enough ahead that they are investable, and that’s resulting in much more money flowing into these areas.

Yuri: This is a good point you bring up – that a lot of wealthy people for some reason aren’t prepared to spend money on fundamental research on aging but somehow desire a financial return on their investments in this field. Do you know why that is? Why can’t they realize that in their position, it is much more rational to try to convert their wealth into something much more valuable that they cannot yet ever get back, which is years of healthy life. Why do they try to also make money on this research?

Aubrey de Grey: Well, it’s not really a rational decision, and it’s different for every individual, whether it’s for that reason or any other. Let me first say that it actually seems less of a problem in Russia. Our single biggest donor at the moment is Vitalik Buterin, the guy who created Ethereum, who is a Canadian of Russian heritage. Another major donor of ours is a guy named Michael Antonov, one of the co-founders of Oculus. I think maybe Russians have less of a problem with this. However, in general, the kind of people who have a lot of money and who are also visionary enough and understand technology enough, they tend to be the kind of people who made their money by doing certain things; they got it through the capitalist system. So, those kinds of people are inherently biased in favor of that system and against philanthropy. Then, of course, there are many other reasons. There are some people who won’t give us money because they don’t think it’s a good idea to defeat aging. There are plenty of people who want to give us money, but their wives think it’s crazy. I am not kidding! There are at least a couple of our major verbal supporters who I know for a fact that that’s why they are not giving us significant amounts of money. Another reason, I think, is that some people just have overly big egos, so they think they can do better than us even when they can’t.

Yuri: Let me probe you a little bit more on this. You brought up wealthy Russians and people who think they can have a go at aging themselves. Would Sergey Brin qualify as one of those people who decided they know better and founded their own company, Calico, for precisely this reason?

Aubrey de Grey: Yeah, I had a funny feeling you might ask me about that. I have a very low opinion of Calico. The fundamental reason for this is because of Larry and Sergey. In fairness to Sergey, my understanding is that Calico is mainly a Larry project, or at least more so than a Sergey project. Of course, they are both on the Board of Directors, and they both share the responsibility. At the end of the day, Calico is a catastrophe, and it’s their fault. They just created it wrongly.

They’ve known me for fifteen years; they could easily have told me, “Listen. We don’t like charity. We want to create a company, and we want you to run it,” and I would’ve said “No problem!” and they knew that. Instead, they decided to be more traditional about this. I don’t know why. Maybe they don’t like people who have beards.

The fact is that they made an absolute catastrophe of it. They started out reasonably sensibly by hiring Art Levinson, the world’s best biotech CEO, but what they didn’t do was tell him what to do next. They gave him a job to cure aging, and he doesn’t have the slightest idea how to cure aging, and he knows that he doesn’t have the slightest idea. So, he hired someone who he thought would have an idea how to do it and made him Chief Science Officer. Unfortunately, he didn’t know how to make that decision either, so he hired completely the wrong person. He hired a completely inveterate basic scientist, David Botstein, who is a fantastic scientist but who doesn’t understand technology. In fact, he went on record saying that he doesn’t have a translational bone in his body. You don’t get that sort of person to run an outfit that’s supposed to be solving a technological problem. Sure enough, they are doing fantastic research that will understand aging better and better as time goes on over the next century, but they will never, ever, if they follow their current strategy, actually make any kind of difference in how long people can stay healthy and, therefore, how long they can stay alive.

Yuri: Why do so few people have a sense of urgency that we need to do everything possible to combat aging within our lifetimes and not centuries to follow?

Aubrey de Grey: There are two answers to that. The David Botstein answer, the Calico answer, is that they just don’t understand the idea of knowing enough. People who work on basic science understand how to find things out, but that’s all they understand. For them, the best questions to work on are the questions whose answers will simply create new questions. Their purpose in life is to create new questions rather than to use the answers for a humanitarian benefit. They don’t object to humanitarian benefit, but they regard it as not their problem. You can’t change that. Botstein is a fantastic scientist, but he’s in the wrong job.

The other part of your question, why people, in general, do not regard aging with a sense of urgency, has a different answer. People weigh up the desirability and the feasibility. Remember that everyone has been brought up to believe that aging is inevitable, I mean completely inevitable in the sense that stopping it would be like creating perpetual motion. If the probability of doing something about this thing is zero, then the desirability doesn’t matter anymore. So, under that assumption, we really ought to put it out of our minds and get on with our miserably short lives. That’s all we can do.

Yuri: So it’s a case of learned helplessness?

Aubrey de Grey: Yes, exactly, it is learned helplessness, and it’s a perfectly reasonable, rational thing to be thinking until a plan comes along that can actually solve the problem: a plan that demonstrates that we actually might be within striking distance of genuinely solving the problem. That only happened quite recently. Of course, I have a huge mountain to climb to persuade people that we have crossed the boundary from this being just a recreational, exploratory field to it being a technological, translational field.

Yuri: Have you had success in the past fifteen years that you’ve been climbing this mountain; have you seen that the public’s perception has greatly improved?

Aubrey de Grey: Absolutely. Things have got hugely easier. I mean, there is a huge amount of the mountain still to climb, but we have climbed a hell of a lot of it. Just the nature of a conversation, the kinds of people who want to hear about this. The way in which credentialed scientists with reputations that they need to protect are willing to embrace this. We could not conceivably have created the scientific advisory board that we have now fifteen or even ten years ago. There are thirty people there who are all world-leading luminaries in their fields, and they are all signed up very explicitly to the ideas that comprehensive damage repair is a thing and that it actually has a good chance of genuinely defeating aging. So, I’ve won the scientific argument.

People are even reinventing the whole idea of comprehensive damage repair and pretending it’s a new idea. Five years ago, there was a paper called “The Hallmarks of Aging” published by five very senior professors in Europe. That paper is saying pretty much exactly what I said eleven years before it. The key difference is that unlike my work, this work is being noticed. In fact, it’s been more than noticed. It’s become the definition of what’s useful work to do. This one paper that was only published 5 years ago has been cited more than 2,000 times already. There’s no question that it’s going to be, by far, the most highly cited paper in the whole of the biology of aging this decade, and it has the same ideas that I put forward the previous decade. So that’s fantastic. I’d like to have more credit, but I really don’t care about that; what I care about is that the idea is now in the mainstream.

Yuri: You mentioned your plan for comprehensive damage repair; could you elaborate a little bit more on what the plan actually is?

Aubrey de Grey: Sure. The idea is to emulate what a mechanic would do to maintain a car. We know that this works; there are cars over a hundred years old that are still running and are doing so just as well as when they were built. We know that they are not doing that because they were designed to last that long; they were probably designed to last only ten years. They’ve vastly exceeded their warranty period, and they’ve done so because of comprehensive damage repair.

The only reason that we can’t do this to the human body already is that the human body has more complexity and more types of damage. However, it’s a manageable amount of complexity. In particular, the big thing that led me through to this route was when I realized back in the year 2000 that we could classify all of the types of damage that the body accumulates into seven major categories, for each of which there’s a generic approach to fixing it.

For example, one of the categories is cell loss, which is when cells are dying and not being automatically replaced by the division of other cells. The repair, of course, is stem cell therapy. We simply put cells into the body that have been pre-programmed into a state where they know what to do to divide and transform themselves into replacements for the cells that the body is not replacing on its own. That’s just one of the seven types of damage that I enumerated, and, of course, that direction is very well advanced. We have hardly ever done any work in stem cells because we didn’t need to; other people are doing all of the work that’s necessary.

The other six categories are more neglected; they are in an earlier stage. That’s why we created the SENS Foundation to push them forward. We’ve been very successful. A number of those things have reached a point where we could actually create a startup company and transfer technology into it, so it would attract investment from the kinds of people I was mentioning earlier who don’t like to give money away.

Yuri: So you’ve created several startups, could you elaborate on the ones that have the most potential?

Aubrey de Grey: They’re all doing pretty well. Let me just focus on one as an illustration: Ichor Therapeutics. Ichor is all about macular degeneration, which is, of course, the number one cause of blindness in the elderly. The category in SENS that it comes under is the accumulation of molecular waste products inside cells. They accumulate in different cells in many different ways. It’s a side effect of their normal operation. Different cells accumulate different types of waste products. One of them is a byproduct of vitamin A that is created in the eye as a side effect of the chemistry of vision, and it poisons cells at the back of the eye called retinal pigmented epithelial cells.

What we’ve done is identify enzymes in bacteria that are able to break down this toxic waste product. If they can break it down, the waste product no longer accumulates. We have identified the genes for these enzymes, and we’ve been able to incorporate them into human cells in such a way that they still work. Ichor is pursuing that, and it will probably soon start clinical trials to pursue this as a cure for macular degeneration later this year. This is dry macular degeneration, the major form in the elderly.

Yuri: Could you tell us about some other startups that you’ve spun out from SENS?

Aubrey de Grey: Sure. Ichor was part of LysoSENS. Another one that we’ve spun off is called AmyloSENS. We’ve got a problem of waste products that accumulate not inside the cells but in the spaces between the cells. In theory, those waste products are easier to get rid of, because they’re inherently easier to break down. The way we do it is by actually getting cells to swallow this stuff, internalize it, and then break it down. There are various ways to trick the immune system into doing that. In the case of Alzheimer’s, this was done some years ago, and it’s already working in clinical trials.

Our focus has been on other types of waste products that are similar to the plaques in Alzheimer’s disease, but they consist of different proteins, and they occur in different tissues. We’ve been able to fund a group in Texas that was able to create some antibodies that could break down the extracellular garbage which is actually the number one killer for really old people, people over the age of 110. That’s now been turned into a company.

Another example is a company that’s being run by the person who used to be our Chief Operating Officer. It’s a company focused on organ preservation. It’s well-known that there’s a huge shortage of organs for transplants. Many thousands of people die every year on waiting lists, just waiting for an organ that is sufficiently immunocompatible for them and that happens to be donated by somebody who dies really nearby. That is a requirement for that organ to be given to the recipient fast enough before it breaks down. We want to solve that transport problem and create whole banks of organs with a variety of immunological profiles. In order to do that, we need to be able to freeze them, but in order to freeze them, we need to develop ways that will not cause damage to the organ in the process of freezing. The company we spun out has got a wonderful new technology that is really good at that.

Yuri: Is that Arigos? The company that uses helium persufflation for cryopreservation?

Aubrey de Grey: That’s the one. You are very well-informed!

Yuri: Can you comment on Human Regeneration Biotechnologies?

Aubrey de Grey: That was our first spin-off, actually. It’s now got a shorter name. It’s called Human Bio, and it’s run and funded by a guy named Jason Hope, who was, for some time, one of our most major donors. He’s now focusing his funding on the company. It was initially created to do something very similar to what we’re doing with Ichor in macular degeneration. In that case, it was for atherosclerosis. The target was not this byproduct of vitamin A; instead, it was oxidized cholesterol, and they have kind of run into the sand a little bit on that. We’re trying to reactivate it right now, but they’ve got other interests as well. They’re working on senolytics, drugs that will kill senescent cells. They are potentially going to be quite a big player in a number of different areas at SENS. At the moment, they are a bit stealthy; they don’t need money, because they are funded by this wealthy guy. They are not going around telling everyone all that much about what they are doing, the way that most of these companies are.

Yuri: What about enzymes that are meant to break glucosepane crosslinks? Is there a startup for that?

Aubrey de Grey: We have funded research on glucosepane at Yale University. We’ve funded that for about 4-5 years now. They had a fantastic publication 2 years ago, where they made a huge breakthrough in this area. Essentially, they first had to be able to make glucosepane in large quantities without a high expense. That was published in Science; that’s our highest-profile publication in any area. It was important because it allowed them to proceed with obvious things, such as identifying enzymes that could break it. That was very successful: they have identified half a dozen enzymes that seem to be promising. For a couple of those enzymes, there’s a pretty good understanding of how they work. Now is the right time to create a company out of that, and that’s exactly what’s happening. That company is a month or two from being incorporated, and its funding is established.

Yuri: Great, so we’ll be on the lookout for an announcement for that company to be spun off.

Aubrey de Grey: It’s going to be called Revel.

Yuri: Ah, let’s hope we can one day revel in its accomplishments.

Aubrey de Grey: That’s right!

Yuri: We might have gotten a bit too deep into science for a casual reader. Maybe we can step back and you could elaborate on what you think actually causes aging? I know there are different schools of thought on that in the scientific community so maybe you can share your perspective?

Aubrey de Grey: I get rather sick of this question, actually. You know, there’s nothing that “causes” aging. What causes the aging of a car? You wouldn’t ask that question: you know that that’s a stupid question. All I really want to tell you is that the aging of a living organism is no different fundamentally than the aging of an inanimate machine like a car or an airplane. Therefore, questions like “What causes aging?” are no more sensible for a living organism than they are for a car.

Yuri: If the underlying causes of aging are the same for all organisms, why do you think there’s such a big difference in lifespan between different species: some live for just a few months, while others for centuries?

Aubrey de Grey: The analogy with inanimate machines like cars works perfectly well there too. Some cars are designed to last 50 years, like Land Rovers, for example, but most cars are only designed to last 10 years. It’s just the same for living organisms. Some living organisms have evolved to age more slowly. A perfectly good question is what causes evolution to create this disparity? Some species in a particular ecological niche, say, at the top of the food chain have an evolutionary imperative to age slowly, whereas species that get eaten a lot don’t need to have good anti-aging defenses built into them. That’s really the basis for why there is this variation in the rate of aging across the living world.

Yuri: The more interesting question is when will humanity actually conquer aging?

Aubrey de Grey: It all depends on how rapidly research goes, and that depends on money. Which is why when people ask me, “What can I do today to maximize my chances of living healthy and for a long time?” I tell them to write me a large check. It’s the only thing one can do right now. The situation right now is that everything we have today – no matter how many books are written about this or that diet or whatever – is that basically, we have nothing over and above just doing what your mother told you: in other words, not smoking, not getting seriously overweight, and having a balanced diet. If you adhere to the obvious stuff, you are doing pretty much everything that we can do today. The additional amount that you can get from just any kind of supplement regime, diet, or whatever is tiny. The thing to do is hasten the arrival of therapy for the betterment of what we have today. That’s where the check comes in.

Yuri: Some people probably couldn’t afford to write a sizable check; maybe they can do something else?

Aubrey de Grey: What I always say in relation to that is that the poorer you are, the more people you know who are richer than you. Therefore, the less you can do in terms of writing your own check, the more you can do in terms of persuading other people to write checks.

Yuri: So it’s activism, being vocal about aging research?

Aubrey de Grey: Absolutely. It’s activism and advocacy: it’s all about spreading the word and raising the level of people’s understanding of the fact that aging is the world’s biggest problem.

Yuri: Do you see any increase in funding for longevity research over the past 10 years?

Aubrey de Grey: Things have certainly improved. I mean, there’s more money coming into the foundation, a little bit more money, but there’s a lot more money coming into the private sector, into the companies I mentioned and other companies that have emerged in parallel with us. The overall funding for rejuvenation biotechnology has increased a lot in the past few years, and we need it to increase a lot more. The private sector can’t do everything, not yet, anyway. There will come a time when SENS Research Foundation will be able to declare victory and say, “Listen, everything that needs to be done is being done well enough in the private sector that we no longer need to exist.” For the moment, that’s not true. For the moment, there are still quite a few areas in SENS that are at the pre-investable stage where only philanthropy will allow them to progress to the point where they are investable.

Yuri: It’s great to hear that there is money coming into SENS because from what I understand, there was a time when you had to use your own money to fund the foundation, is that correct?

Aubrey de Grey: That’s right. I inherited 16.5 million dollars of which I donated 13 million. That was back in 2012 before we had any projects that we could spin out into companies. That inheritance was very timely, but the point is that I would still do it even now. If my mother died today, I’d probably do the same thing, because the foundation is still the engine room of the industry. For the foundation, it’s kind of double aid. The more progress we make, the more credible the whole idea becomes, which, of course, improves our ability to bring in money. We are also creating new opportunities where you can invest rather than donate, so it’s kind of a disincentive to donate. There’s a balance there. Of course, every donor is different; some donors are more philanthropically inclined than others.

Yuri: From what I understand, you’ve had some high-profile donors like Peter Thiel who’s been supporting the foundation for a number of years. Is he still a supporter?

Aubrey de Grey: Peter started supporting us in 2006, 12 years ago. He’s actually pretty much phased out now. I understand that. Ultimately, he’s much more comfortable with investing than donating. He wanted to be sure that we’re actually creating something, and sure enough, we are. We speak all the time to his investment advisors, who focus on investment opportunities in the biotech sector, especially in the anti-aging sector. I’m sure that he will continue to contribute financially to this field, though the contributions are quite likely to be focused more on the companies rather than the foundation.

One way in which Peter is donating indirectly right now is that he funded Vitalik Buterin four years ago as a Thiel Fellow under the 20 Under 20 program. That was how and where Vitalik created Ethereum, which of course made Vitalik very wealthy, and Vitalik donated 2.5 million dollars to us a few months ago. He is very much philanthropically inclined. So, Peter is still donating to us by proxy.

Yuri: What about his PayPal co-founder, Elon Musk? Has Peter ever connected you two or maybe you spoke to Elon yourself?

Aubrey de Grey: I have indeed met Elon many years ago, probably 10 years ago. I haven’t met him recently. In general, I think it’s quite unlikely that Elon will get heavily involved in this just because he’s got other things to focus on. It’s a bit like Bill Gates, though in the opposite direction. Bill Gates has pretty much explicitly said that his priority is to help the disadvantaged. He’s much more interested in mosquito nets in sub-Saharan Africa and less interested in people who already have advantages. Elon is kind of at the other end of the spectrum. He is more of a “toys for boys” kind of guy. He’s more interested in space travel and solar energy and so on. The thing is I don’t want to take money away from either one of those two people. I think that both of them are doing fantastic work that really matters for humanity. There are plenty of other people, such as Peter Thiel, who are in the middle, who do understand the enormous value of defeating aging, and who have the vision to understand who is likely to be able to do it, so I don’t want to distract either Elon or Bill from what they’re already doing.

Yuri: Do you think Elon might be moving in a somewhat different direction of mind uploading for circumventing aging?

Aubrey de Grey: Yes and no. I kind of pay attention to what he is doing with Neuralink and what people like Bryan Johnson are doing with Kernel. I am closely connected with those groups. I know a lot of people in that space. At the end of the day, I think they know as well as I do that it’s very, very speculative. Ways in which we might transfer our consciousness, our personality to different hardware, while still satisfying ourselves that we are genuinely the same person after the transfer rather than just creating a new person – those are pretty speculative ideas. There is a long way to go to make them even slightly comparable to something that competes with medical research.

Yuri: So you think that mind uploading, even if theoretically possible, is still far off in the future as something feasible?

Aubrey de Grey: It’s always dangerous these days to say that such and such technology is definitely not going to be developed until some particular number of years in the future. At some point, people said that the game of Go would never fall to a computer, but then AlphaGo came along. However, it is a certainty that the distance that we have to go is much larger in the case of mind uploading than in the case of the boring “wet approach” of medical research.

Yuri: Speaking of AlphaGo and AI, some researchers in the aging space are working AI as a kind of proxy to help us solve biology. What do you think about that approach?

Aubrey de Grey: There is definitely an intersection there. I actually know a lot of people who are at the cutting edge of AI research. I actually know Demis Hassabis, the guy who runs DeepMind, from when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge several years after me. We’ve kept in touch and try to connect every so often. I think it’s reasonable to view these things as very linked. I certainly agree with you that there are some AI researchers who are working on AI precisely because they don’t trust people like me to get the job done by the “wet approach”. That’s fine; they may be right, and if they are right, I’ll be just as happy for them to save my life rather than me saving their lives.

Yuri: Do you think we’re close to having AI help us with biology, or do you think it’s still years away?

Aubrey de Grey: There are some medical AI startups that are looking at ways to use machine learning against aging. One of the most prominent is InSilico Medicine led by Alex Zhavoronkov, which is largely focused on identifying drugs that can work in particular ways. It’s a very important area. I’m sure that we will use AI a lot in medical research in general. Whether we will go as far as supplanting medical research with the mind uploading approach, that’s a different question altogether.

Yuri: One of your most famous quotes is that you think that a person who will live for over 1,000 years has already been born. Do you still think so and what are the chances for, say, a 50-year-old person today to reach what you call Longevity Escape Velocity?

Aubrey de Grey: I certainly think what I used to think, and it is indeed as a result of the concept of the longevity escape velocity. I do not believe that even within the next hundred years, we’re likely to develop therapies that can completely 100% succeed in repairing all the damage that body does to itself in the course of its normal operation. I do believe that we have a very good chance within the next 20-25 years of fixing most of that damage, and most are good enough because it buys time to fix a bit more and then a bit more. The reason it buys time because the body is set up to tolerate having a certain amount of damage without significantly declining function. I think we’ve got a very good chance of getting to that point while we are staying one step ahead of the problem by improving the comprehensiveness of the therapies faster than time is passing.

Yuri: So that is essentially the definition of Longevity Escape Velocity, right?

Aubrey de Grey: Yes, to be precise, Longevity Escape Velocity is the minimum rate at which we will need to improve the comprehensiveness of these therapies subsequent to the point where we get the first ones working so they get us a couple of decades of extra life. The good news is that longevity escape velocity goes down with time, because the more we can repair, the longer it takes for the stuff we can’t repair to become problematic.

Yuri: If you had unlimited funding, how long do you think it would take for us to reach Longevity Escape Velocity or the technology necessary for it?

Aubrey de Grey: It’s actually pretty difficult to answer that question because the amount of funding is kind of self-fulfilling. Every increment of progress that we achieve makes the whole idea more credible, makes more people more interested, and makes it easier to bring in the money to make the next step. I think that, at the moment, unlimited funding could probably let us increase our rate of progress by a factor of three, but that does not mean that we will change the time to get to Longevity Escape Velocity by a factor of three, because when we get even a little bit closer to it, it will be easier to get money, and that factor of three will come down. I think that right now, if we got like a billion dollars in the bank, then, in the next year, we would probably do the same amount of work and make the same amount of progress that we would otherwise make in the next three years. In the year after that, only two years of progress, and in the year after that, only a year and a half, and so on. What that adds up to is that if I got a billion dollars today, we would probably bring forward the defeat of aging by about 10 years. And it’s a lot of lives, maybe 400 million lives.

Yuri: Yes, given that 100,000 people die per day from aging-related causes, it’s a lot of lives.

Aubrey de Grey: Yup.

Yuri: So, you said, “if I had a billion in the bank”. The Chan/Zuckerberg Initiative – they said they are prepared to spend 3 billion dollars to eradicate all diseases by 2099. Maybe they can set aside 1 billion for your work. Did you ever communicate with them?

Aubrey de Grey: All I can say is that my email address is not very difficult to find online. No, we have not been in talks, and they have not made it easy for us to get in touch with them.

Yuri: That’s disappointing, especially given your close geographic proximity and the fact that you probably have an overlapping social and professional network.

Aubrey de Grey: Yes, it is very disappointing. Of course, you can argue that it’s not quite as disappointing as the situation with Calico. Because in the case of Calico we are talking about people with equally deep pockets who have known me for 15 years and who have already decided that aging itself is a thing to target. Zuckerberg, first of all, he never met me, God knows how much he knows about what we even do. Certainly, none of the pronouncements from the Chan/Zuckerberg Initiative indicate that they even understand that aging is a medical problem. They may have a long way to get to the point of even considering this.

Yuri: Yes, they do use some odd phrasing, speaking about “eradicating all diseases”, considering that all age-related diseases have one root cause – the aging process.

Aubrey de Grey: This is part of the problem. People simply should not be using the word “disease” for age-related diseases. The fact is that if a medical condition is age-related, then it’s part of aging, as it mainly affects people who have been born a long time ago. That means that it shouldn’t be described using the terminology that makes people think that it’s a bit like infection. People will often tell each other that I say that aging is a disease or a collection of diseases. But that’s completely wrong: I say the exact opposite. I say that not only should the word “disease” not be broadened to include aging, it should be narrowed to exclude the so-called diseases of old age.

Yuri: So that would be cancer, Alzheimer’s and all kinds of heart conditions…

Aubrey de Grey: Yes, and atherosclerosis, everything that’s bad for people who have been born a long time ago but that very rarely, if ever, affects people in young adulthood.

Yuri: So would you call Alzheimer’s a pathology then? If it’s not a disease?

Aubrey de Grey: I would call it part of aging. The problem is the idea of carving up little bits of aging, pretending that they are separate from each other. They’re not; they’re all parts of – consequences of – a lifelong accumulation of damage.

Yuri: Interesting. There’s been quite a large ongoing effort among the aging research advocacy community to persuade WHO to include aging as a disease in its International Classification of Diseases.

Aubrey de Grey: Yes, it seems to be going quite well, and I am very pleased to see that this effort is being led by some Russians: Daria Khaltourina, who is very much Russian, and by Ilia Stambler, who is from Israel but of Russian extraction. Again, the Russians seem to “get it” much easier than most people and it’s very heartening to me.

Yuri: Do you support this inclusion of aging into ICD as a separate disease?

Aubrey de Grey: The ICD is a little bit different. The “D” in the ICD stands for disease, but the purpose of the ICD is to determine which things medicine should be attacking. It really should be the IC of “medical conditions”. We should be distinguishing medical conditions that are extrinsic, such as infections, from the ones that are intrinsic consequences of being alive, that are age-related. I believe that it would be better if we did that by using different words, but medical conditions of old age are medical conditions, and they ought to be listed in the ICD.

Yuri: I see. Thanks for clarifying! Can I ask you about your new role with Michael West at AgeX and BioTime?

Aubrey de Grey: Michael West and I have been friends for 20 years, and, of course, we have very closely aligned goals in life. We’ve never been able to work together in a formal capacity until now, but we’ve been very much mutual admirers. I’ve always looked up to Mike as someone who, way before anyone else, did something that I thought was impossible with the creation of an actual gerontology research company, as was the case with Geron 20 years ago. He’s done it three times by now: Geron, then Advanced Cell Technology, and now with BioTime.

AgeX is a new subsidiary of BioTime that is about to be floated independently on the stock market. The goal, of course, is very much our goal: damage repair. The area that AgeX is focusing on is stem cells. There are two main themes within AgeX. One of them is stem cell therapy in the normal sense: in other words, injecting stem cells. The particular differentiator that AgeX and BioTime have is the ability to create particularly pure populations of a particular type of stem cells, ones that will only do what you want them to do – they are lineage committed in a particular way. That’s something that other organizations don’t have the ability to do nearly so well, and it’s very important; you want to be able to give the people the type of stem cells they need and not give them the other ones in the wrong place, which might do damage. That’s one side.

The other side of AgeX, which is at a much earlier stage of development, so you shouldn’t be looking out for any products on the basis of this yet, is induced stemness. In other words, it’s giving an organism not stem cells per se but rather reagents that would cause cells already in the body to revert a little bit, become more stem-like and be more able to regenerate the tissues. We already have one compound that has this effect, but we have lots and lots more work to do that will allow this to be done safely and effectively.

Yuri: Is this based on Michael West’s work in planarians, axolotls and other animals that demonstrate the ability to regenerate lost limbs even in adulthood?

Aubrey de Grey: No, not really. Certainly, we pay attention to the regenerative capacity of lower organisms, but the main focus of AgeX’s work is on what happens in early development in mammals, particularly the phase change that happens during early development, which we call the embryonic-fetal transition. It’s a little bit imprecise; we are still characterizing it, and there’s still work to do and stuff to be understood. Basically, what happens is that over a relatively short period of time during development, there is a change in the level of expression in a number of genes; some of them go up, and some go down. The particular change that happens across the entire embryo seems to coincide with – and we think it’s causally related with – the loss of regenerative capacity. In other words, before this transition, a particular type of injury to the embryo is entirely reversed by regeneration, whereas after this transaction, the same type of injury is not reversed, it’s rather patched up with scarring. That’s what happens in the adult as well. We believe that this is very indicative of something that’s going on across the whole body and that has a close relationship with the decline in regenerative capacity and repair capacity against various problems within aging.

Yuri: Is that the COX7A1 gene that was described in a paper in conjunction with Alex Zhavoronkov?

Aubrey de Grey: Yes, COX7A1 is one of the genes that change expression during the embryonic-fetal transition. We do not yet know, or at least we’re not sure, whether it plays a causal role or whether it’s just a marker. We are definitely looking quite a lot at other genes that also change, but COX7A1 is the one we focused on first and most at this point, basically just because it has the sharpest transition in the cell types that we studied so far.

Yuri: Would gene therapy be the vehicle to deliver to the body a way to modulate that gene?

Aubrey de Grey: It might be. Exactly what you do depends on which cell types you decide matter the most in expressing or not expressing a gene and in terms of what gene you want to express. Yes, we might do it with gene therapy. Of course, there are different types of gene therapy. For example, if you want to knock a gene down, you can do RNA interference, which is something that doesn’t involve integrating a new gene into the cell’s DNA. If you want to knock a gene up, you can sometimes also do it by RNA interference, because you can sometimes find the genes that antagonize the gene you want to knock up. If you knock down the gene that antagonizes the gene you want to knock up, then it happens indirectly. There are lots of tricks that are specific to the details of the genetic network, but in general, we would want to manipulate the level of expression and effectiveness of certain genes that change during the embryonic-fetal transition.

Yuri: Can I ask you about a different potential gene therapy, for example, partial reprogramming using Yamanaka factors? Do you think it has any potential as a systemic anti-aging therapy?

Aubrey de Grey: This is the idea that’s actually very similar to what I just described when I talked about the idea of restoration of stemness that we are pursuing at AgeX. Mostly, we don’t know which way is going to work better. We believe that we have a priority in terms of intellectual property, which, of course, is important for investors, but that’s not my problem; I’m focusing on the science.

Obviously, we don’t know which way is going to work best. There are lots of possibilities. The guys who pioneered the idea of partial reprogramming in vivo – there’s a group in Spain led by Manuel Serrano, who is someone I know very well; he’s spoken at one or two of our conferences in Cambridge. He’s a great guy doing a number of other really useful things; he’s got a brilliant new innovation in terms of killing senescent cells as well, which is a completely different area of SENS, of course. More recently, someone in San Diego named Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte developed a similar technique that he was able to make work, and his technique involved the intermittent inducible expression of the Yamanaka factors. Essentially, what will determine which of these approaches is the best is not just how well it works but how much harm it does, because there is always a possibility with these things that you will cause cells to become more regenerative that you wished were less regenerative, such as cancer cells, and we need to find a way to control that. It’s possible that AgeX will be able to do this better by using different genes.

Yuri: Okay, great. The reason I knew about Arigos earlier is that I am a big proponent of cryonics. I wanted to ask about your views on cryonics and whether you would personally consider it for yourself?

Aubrey de Grey: Cryonics in general – my position is well known. I’ve been a member of Alcor and a member of its scientific advisory board for 16 years now. I am definitely a very strong supporter. I think that it’s an absolute tragedy that cryonics is still such a backwater publicly and that a large majority of people still believe that it has no chance of ever working. Complete nonsense! If people understood it better, there would be more research done to develop better cryopreservation technologies, and more people would have a chance at life.

The question is what can we do to make cryonics work really well? I certainly don’t have a strong philosophical position with regard to what kinds of revival constitute actual revival and what kinds constitute creating a totally new person from information that you got from the old person. I am not a philosopher, so don’t ask me about that. My personal inclination is that if I have to be cryopreserved at all, and I hope not to be just like any cryonicist, then I prefer to be woken up by being warmed up rather than by being rebuilt from some kind of information restored from slicing and scanning my original brain. Therefore, I am really interested in improving the cryopreservation process: in other words, reducing the amount of damage that is inflicted by the process of cryopreservation and therefore would need to be repaired for successful reanimation; of course, this is along with the damage that the body already had that led to it getting declared legally dead in the first place. Arigos, with its helium persufflation approach, is, in my mind, a massive breakthrough, a breakthrough even bigger than vitrification, which was made 20 or so years ago by Greg Fahy and his peers at 21st Century Medicine when they identified a rather elaborate cocktail of cryoprotectants called M22 that allows biological material of any size to be cryopreserved without any crystallization at all. It eliminated over 90% of the damage that cryopreservation would hitherto have done to biological tissues. After that, it had become the standard of care at Alcor, the Cryonics Institute, KrioRus, and elsewhere.

We need more because the fact is that we still got a lot of cracking that happens – large-scale fracturing – and we’ve also got the toxicity of cryoprotectants, which is mild but non-trivial. Persufflation appears to solve both of these problems pretty much 100% by pumping helium through the vasculature, thereby stopping cracks from propagating, and cooling so much faster that you can vastly lower the concentration of cryoprotectants and still get no crystallization.

Yuri: Did you work with Greg Fahy or Mike Darwin at all on this technology?

Aubrey de Grey: I don’t work with any of these people, but I certainly talk to them. I am not sure what Mike Darwin has done, but Greg, as far as I know, had no work with persufflation itself. Obviously, he pioneered vitrification, but persufflation is something that was first explored in the Soviet Union, I don’t know exactly where, decades ago. Rather like parabiosis, it’s an area that was explored in the Soviet Union and then fell into neglect, and then everyone forgot about it for a long time, and then people in California found out about it and started to do something. The big innovation that Arigos has introduced was using helium, which has a number of advantages for cryonics purposes, but we are definitely building on what was originally done in the Soviet Union.

Certainly, Greg Fahy has been involved in the conversation. He has been advising a lot, and my current understanding is that he is very optimistic about the promise of persufflation, which tells a lot about Greg. The fact is that if persufflation works as well as it’s probably going to work, it’s going to blow Greg’s last 20 years of work out of the water. It takes a lot of honor.

Yuri: Absolutely; Greg is an amazing scientist and human being. I think for him, just as for you, it’s all about defeating aging first, and everything else is secondary. In any case, do you have any other cryonics research planned as part of SENS or Arigos?

Aubrey de Grey: Not as part of SENS, but, of course, I talk to all these people all the time. Something that you might be aware of, which happened very recently, was that Alcor received a very large donation of 5 million dollars specifically for research from Brad Armstrong, one of the people who made plenty of money on cryptocurrencies.

Yuri: It’s great to see crypto millionaires donating money to longevity research.

Aubrey de Grey: Yes, 5 million dollars is a hell of a lot of money for research in cryonics compared to what’s been available up until now. I am actively helping Max More, CEO of Alcor, to decide how to spend it.

Yuri: That’s great to hear. Maybe we’ll get some research done on the restoration of brain activity after cryopreservation. I know that Greg Fahy has done some prior work on assessing LTP preservation, but it’s probably outside of the scope of our interview.

Switching topics, there’s a lot of talk about the biohacking community lately, and a lot of people call themselves biohackers these days. Some claim that taking supplements or working out qualifies as biohacking. Do you consider yourself a biohacker; do you take any supplements or nootropics like Ray Kurzweil or Dave Asprey or do anything else that could be considered as biohacking?

Aubrey de Grey: I don’t take any supplements; I don’t do anything special with my lifestyle. I am not saying that that’s my recommendation for other people. My situation is very strongly that I am prepared to listen to my body. I know that I am just a lucky guy. I am genetically built so that my aging is slow, and I am fortunate enough to have been tested for a total of five times now over the past 15 years; they’ve measured 150 different things in my blood and did all manner of physiological and cognitive tests. I always come out really well, way younger than I actually am, so I should be conservative: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

I eat and drink what I like, and nothing happens. I will pay attention to the situation when it changes, but it’s not changing yet. There’s a couple of things that I do that are bad for my health, especially the fact that I travel so much that I am not getting enough sleep. I think I’ve been coping with that so far as well, and, of course, the reason I do this is to hasten the defeat of aging with all the work that I do. Maybe it’s a net win. The bottom line is that I’m lucky.

I don’t say that Ray Kurzweil is being dumb in doing what he’s doing. On the contrary, Ray is one of the unlucky people; he came down with Type 2 diabetes in his 30s, and his family has had a lot of cardiovascular problems. It probably makes sense for him to be taking all of these supplements in order to largely normalize his rate of aging. For somebody whose rate is normal or better, there’s no evidence that taking supplements could actually have any benefit.

Yuri: What about the cognitive enhancers that Dave Asprey is recommending? Have you ever found anything that works or that you have considered trying?

Aubrey de Grey: No, I let my brain do what it normally does. Even for jet lag or needing to go to sleep, I don’t need these things. I can get to sleep whenever I am tired, whatever time of day it is. I occasionally thought it might be good to have a stash of modafinil just to be able to get through times when I need to stay awake for a long time, but I managed to work my way around those periods, so I haven’t done that either.

Yuri: Maybe your brain is already overactive – I read that you do math problems for fun, and what was this preprint that you published that made a splash in the media?

Aubrey de Grey: I’ve always played with maths for fun. I am reasonably good with certain types of maths, especially those that don’t need too much background knowledge because I don’t even have a degree in maths like graph theory or combinatorics. Yes, earlier this year, I got lucky and made some progress on a very famous long-standing maths problem called the Hadwiger-Nelson problem, and that got a bit of attention. The thing that strikes me the most about all that is that a number of people said, “I always thought Aubrey de Grey was a bit of a lunatic and never paid any attention to what he said about aging, but now that he made progress in this maths problem, he’s obviously smart, so now I will pay attention to what he says about aging.” I think that’s the most fucked-up logic you can possibly imagine, but I’ll take it.

Yuri: From what I understand, despite your background in computer science and no formal training in biology, you actually also have a Ph.D. in biology for your work in mitochondrial respiration back in the 1990s. Is that correct?

Aubrey de Grey: Yes, that’s correct. I benefited from the fact that I’d done my undergraduate degree fifteen years earlier in Cambridge. Of course, that was in computer science, but there’s a system at Cambridge where if you do your undergrad degree there, then you don’t have to be a Ph.D. student to get a Ph.D. from Cambridge. You can just submit published work, it gets evaluated like a dissertation, and you do a thesis defense. Mitochondrial respiration was probably the first area in biology that I got interested in and that I was invited to write a book about, so I did. It included the material for the first six papers of mine, and that’s what I ultimately got my Ph.D. for.

Yuri: It seems that the mitochondrial theory of aging was all the rage back then but has lost a lot of its appeal over the past two decades.

Aubrey de Grey: Yeah, that’s a problem. The reasons why things move in and out of fashion in a biological field are often overly superficial. Nothing’s really changed. Twenty years ago, people were overly breathless about mitochondria and free radicals, and they were neglecting the importance of the shortcomings of those theories, which my first couple of papers helped to repair. I pointed out that you can’t just say “mitochondrial mutations matter because free radicals matter.” You’ve got to flesh it out, and I did flesh it out in a way that nobody else had bothered to do.

Conversely, what happened more recently is that people have swung the other way, saying “there’s various new evidence that free radicals don’t matter, therefore game over.” Again, they are being overly simplistic in the opposite direction. In fact, what this new evidence shows is that certain, particularly simplistic, versions of the free radical theory of aging are not true, but people like me who actually pay attention knew that all along. For me, nothing’s really changed.

Yuri: You make an excellent point that there seems to be some kind of fashion in the field of biology in general or aging research in particular. I wonder why; is it just human nature to jump on the bandwagon and reject all other ideas, or is it groupthink? What is it about science?

Aubrey de Grey: In science, I would say it’s even worse than groupthink. It’s not a question of people just being sheep because they can’t think for themselves. Scientists can think for themselves. The problem in science is that people are forced to follow fashion in order to get money, whether it’s in the form of a grant application, funding, getting promoted, or tenure, which is appalling, because the whole point of science is to go against the grain, to be in the minority of one as often as possible, and to find things out that people didn’t know before. However, the way that the scientific career structure these days actually works opposes that. It’s a tragedy.

Yuri: Indeed, the incentives for going against the grain seem to be misaligned. Is there any way to mitigate this?

Aubrey de Grey: The only solution is to throw a lot more money at science so that people can be career scientists in a way that they used to be 200 years ago when no scientists were without patrons, wealthy noblemen who kept them as pets. They were getting stuff done, and they didn’t have to worry about justifying how they were getting stuff done.

Yuri: Well, let’s hope some philanthropically inclined wealthy noblemen hear you and create more fellowships. Okay, final, semi-serious question: once humanity does reach negligible senescence, what would that do to relationships, family institutions, marriage, and children?

Aubrey de Grey: Nothing at all. The only things that would happen as a result of increased longevity are simply the continuation of societal changes that have already been occurring over the past century. What I see is that as people live longer and stay healthy longer, there’s a rapid increase in the number of divorces, the number of people who have multiple relationships over their lives, and it’s just going to be a continuation of that. It’s not interesting.

Yuri: And overpopulation is never going to be an issue, right?

Aubrey de Grey: This is the one that everybody is worried about, but it’s just so silly that people worry about it. I’ve been saying this since forever – and nobody contradicts my answer, they just ignore it – the answer is that the carrying capacity of the planet, the number of people it can sustain without a problematic amount of environmental impact, is going to go up much faster than the population can possibly go up even if we completely eliminated all death. It’s going to go up as a result of renewable energy, artificial meat, desalination, and all those things. It’s just so painfully obvious, and I’ve been saying this in so many interviews and so many talks, and people just ignore it. I think the only reason people are ignoring my answer is because they need to. They need to carry on believing that aging is a blessing in disguise and thus be able to put it out of their minds, get on with their miserably short lives, and not get emotionally invested in the rate of progress that we will make.

Yuri: Well, let’s hope we can shake them out of their learned helplessness in the face of death and aging.

Aubrey de Grey: Absolutely.

Yuri: Great, thank you so much for this interview! I really look forward to seeing you in Moscow soon and discussing some of these issues in person as well as hearing about your latest achievements in the fight against humanity’s biggest problem!

Aubrey de Grey: Indeed! Thanks so much, Yuri, it’s been great.

Yuri Deigin is a serial entrepreneur and an expert in drug development and venture investments in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals. Yuri brings almost a decade of drug discovery and development experience from his previous role in a biotech startup where he oversaw research and development of original medicines aimed at treating diseases like Alzheimer’s and rheumatoid arthritis. Yuri has a track record of not only raising over $20 million for his previous ventures but also initiating and overseeing 4 clinical trials and several pre-clinical studies, including studies in transgenic mice. He also has experience in pharmaceutical product launch, promotion, manufacturing, and supply-chain management. Since 2013 Yuri also serves as a vice-president of the non-profit Foundation “Science for Life Extension” whose goal is the popularization of the fight against age-related diseases. To further this cause, Yuri frequently blogs, speaks, writes op-ed pieces, and participates in various TV and radio shows. Yuri holds a B.Sc. from the University of Toronto and an M.B.A. from Columbia Business School. Yuri is the CEO of biotech company Youthereum Genetics.

U.S. Transhumanist Party Chairman Gennady Stolyarov II Interviewed by Nikola Danaylov of Singularity.FM

On March 31, 2018, Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman of the U.S. Transhumanist Party, was interviewed by Nikola Danaylov, a.k.a. Socrates, of Singularity.FM. A synopsis, audio download, and embedded video of the interview can be found on Singularity.FM here. You can also watch the YouTube video recording of the interview here.

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Apparently this interview, nearly three hours in length, broke the record for the length of Nikola Danaylov’s in-depth, wide-ranging conversations on philosophy, politics, and the future. The interview covered both some of Mr. Stolyarov’s personal work and ideas, such as the illustrated children’s book Death is Wrong, as well as the efforts and aspirations of the U.S. Transhumanist Party. The conversation also delved into such subjects as the definition of transhumanism, intelligence and morality, the technological Singularity or Singularities, health and fitness, and even cats. Everyone will find something of interest in this wide-ranging discussion.

The U.S. Transhumanist Party would like to thank its Director of Admissions and Public Relations, Dinorah Delfin, for the outreach that enabled this interview to happen.

To help advance the goals of the U.S. Transhumanist Party, as described in Mr. Stolyarov’s comments during the interview, become a member for free, no matter where you reside. Click here to fill out a membership application.

Preface

What is ageing? We can define ageing as a process of accumulation of the damage which is just a side-effect of normal metabolism. While researchers still poorly understand how metabolic processes cause damage accumulation, and how accumulated damage cause pathology, the damage itself — the structural difference between old tissue and young tissue — is categorized and understood pretty well. By repairing damage and restoring the previous undamaged — young — state of an organism, we can really rejuvenate it! Sounds very promising, and so it is. And for some types of damage (for example, for senescent cells) it is already proved to work!

He has been involved in private space flight development for over 40 years. Hudson is best known as the founder of Rotary Rocket Company, which in spending ~$30 Million attempted to build a unique single stage to orbit launch vehicle known as the Roton. He helped found Transformational Space T/Space in 2004 and AirLaunch LLC which was awarded the DARPA/USAF FALCON project in 2003.

Previous projects included designs of the Phoenix SSTO, the Percheron, and other rockets, founder of Pacific American Launch Systems, and various consulting projects. Currently, he is the President and CEO of the Space Studies Institute.

Now Hudson brings his excellent engineering skills into rejuvenation biotechnology! He is a founding partner of Oisin Biotechnologies, who are developing a liposomally delivered DNA therapy for the removal of senescent cells from the body. Hudson provided an initial seed donation to help fund the creation of the Methuselah Foundation and SENS Research Foundation.

Interview

Feinerman: Hello, Mr Gary Hudson!

Hudson: Thanks for inviting us to this interview!

Feinerman: You have recently visited an amazing Undoing Aging 2018 conference, which took place in Berlin, 15–17 March, where your colleague, Matthew Scholz, was a speaker. What is your impression?

Hudson: It was a great conference with several important presentations. It put me in mind of the early SENS conferences in Cambridge, UK, which I helped to sponsor. I understand it will now become an annual event. Our CSO Dr. John Lewis also gave an important summary of our work to date.

Feinerman: Will Oisin’s presentations from conference be available for general public?

Hudson: I believe that the SENS Foundation will be posting them but I don’t have details about the timing.

Feinerman: Your last interview was in July 2017, more than half a year ago. What has been accomplished?

Hudson: We have conducted many pre-clinical mouse experiments on both cancer and senescent cell removal. All have been successful and produce very remarkable results. We’ve also conducted a pilot toxicity and safety trial on non-human primates. The results of that trial were also successful and encourage us to proceed to human safety trials as soon as regulatory authorities approve them. We have also spun-out a cancer-focused company, Oisin Oncology, and raised a seed round for that venture.

Feinerman: Great to hear! However, when can we see some papers? People usually trust papers more than mere interviews or press releases. Of course, papers need many efforts not related to research but they will allow you attract more attention from general public, researchers, and investors.

Hudson: Papers are being prepared now for submission to major journals, but that process takes time, especially the peer review. For the moment, most of our data is only available to investors and partners in pharma and the biotech industry.

Feinerman: You planned human clinical trials, have you carried them out?

Hudson: It takes quite some time to organize a human trial and to get it approved. Before one can be conducted, we have to set up so-called “GMP (Good Manufacturing Practice) manufacture of our therapeutic, and then we have to conduct “GLP (Good Laboratory Practice) Tox” studies in two different species. Once that is all completed later this year, then we can begin a human safety trial, or a “Phase 1” trial. All this takes time, but we hope that first safety trials in oncology indications might begin this year, or in early 2019.

Feinerman: Does that mean we have a race between Unity Biotechnology and Oisin and you have all chances to win the race?

Hudson: I don’t see it as a race or a competition. I believe that future anti-aging treatment will require multiple complimentary approaches.

Feinerman: When we can expect your therapy available in the clinic?

Hudson: It’s very difficult to predict. I believe that our cancer treatment will make it to the clinic first, and that could happen in less than five years. Since the FDA doesn’t regard ageing as an indication, it may take longer for our SENSOlytic™ treatment to reach the public, since the regulatory environment will need to change.

Feinerman: As Michael Rae has said, we need not to wait when ageing will be recognised as a disease. You can mark your senolytics as a therapy for specific ageing pathology like fibrosis or chronic inflammation in the same way as Unity does.

Hudson: This is certainly true and is part of our strategy, but many of those endpoints are more difficult to ascertain than oncology endpoints. Additionally, going after oncology approvals can be faster and easier to get to clinic. But we will push forward on several fronts as funding permits.

Feinerman: In your previous interview you have said that you make some tweaks to both the promoter side and the effector side of the constructs that will provide even more interesting and useful extensions to the basic capability, but you can’t discuss those for IP reasons. Can you now say about them?

Hudson: I still can’t say too much about them, but we have conducted animal trials on some of these “tweaks” and they work quite well. The downside to the matter is that every “tweak” requires new trials, and our goal is to get something to the clinic as soon as possible, so many of the improvements will have to wait. Progress is limited based on available funds and personnel resources, of course, but we will move as quickly as we can.

Feinerman: Do you use any CAD software to design your constructs? Are you going to make them public so independent engineers will be able to help you identify new useful pairs of promoters and effectors? Your technology is so powerful that Open Source approach would be very helpful!

Hudson: No, the design of the current constructs are very straightforward and simple. As our patents are issued, their design will become public. If people wish to design their own constructs for particular applications they may contact us for collaboration, though we do have several collaborations active at the moment so we may already be working on similar ideas.

Feinerman: What do you think on targeting your machinery on cells with abnormal telomerase activity to kill cancer? Can you use several conditions — like in programming — several promoters to be more specific?

Hudson: If we targeted telomerase we’d also kill stem cells, just like the side effects of much of conventional chemotherapy. That’s probably not a good idea. But multiple promoters, or synthetic promoters, might be used to achieve the aims of killing only cancer cells. Our initial therapeutic will likely just employ p53 promoter targeting, since we have good data that works.

Feinerman: Yeah, the same issue as when we remove or break telomerase gene: there would be nice to do this only in compromised tissue, but as researchers say it is very difficult to make the removal selective. However, it is not a problem with ALT genes, which cause 15–20% of cancers. Are you going to collaborate with the OncoSENS lab? Also killing cells actively expressing telomerase will be very useful in WILT implementation.

Hudson: We’ve had conversations with the SENS Foundation about OncoSENS and cooperated in a preliminary fashion, but I don’t believe it is currently a research priority for them. We already have enough projects to keep us busy for some time, too!

Feinerman: Now you use only suicide gene as an effector, do you plan to use other genes? For example to enhance the cells, give them ability to produce new enzymes, or temporarily shut down telomerase to help anti-cancer therapy to be more effective.

Hudson: We believe we can express any gene under the control of any promoter we wish to use, so the possibilities are almost endless.

Feinerman: Now we know that epigenetic changes (shift) play a huge role in ageing. Even though there is no consensus among researchers whether they are a cause or a consequence of ageing, experiments show that temporal expression of OSKM transcription factors may have some health benefits by restoring “young” epigenetic profiles. You can remember the Belmonte work, for example. However, the problem in their work is that they used transgenic mice and express OSKM in every their cell. If you temporarily express OSKM in an “old” cell, that is OK, you can “rejuvenate” such a cell. While if you express OSKM in a stem cell which is already biologically “young”, you can force the cell into iPSC, which is a way to cancer. Using your machinery we can target only cells which have “old” expression profiles, and involving normal mice! Such a work will be much “cleaner” and safer than Belmonte’s work.

Hudson: With respect to your comments about reprogramming, Oisin is currently working with a university group on exactly this approach, but I can’t say more at this time. We also believe that first you have to clear existing senescent cells, then you can reprogram successfully.

Feinerman: How many resources, finances, and personnel do you need to move as quickly as possible? Do you have open positions? Maybe, some of our readers have enough finances or experience.

Hudson: We could effectively spend tens of millions or dollar or more, very easily, but it isn’t realistic to assume we could raise that amount — and if we did, we’d lose control of Oisin’s ageing focus, since investors would most likely want us to aim at quick returns. We are always interested in talking with “mission minded” investors, however. As for hiring, we have to do that slowly and judiciously, since labour is one of the biggest costs to a start-up company, and over-hiring can sink a project quickly. We already have more potential hires than we can bring on-board.

Feinerman: Now cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies allow completely new and efficient ways for investments. We can see this as various no-name companies easily rise tens of millions dollars via ICOs for clearly doubtful projects. Would you like to make an ICO? Oisin shows real progress and can easily rise big sums! People say that they will be glad to buy your tokens if you issue them. You have said that you prefer to work with “mission minded” investors. There are thousands people out there who can invest from $1,000 to $100,000 in cryptocurrencies and who believe that radical extension of healthy life is possible!

If you are worried about legal issues, you can use various cryptocurrency investment funds who act like proxies between holders of cryptocurrencies and companies.

Hudson: We have investigated several of these financing options, but we are not expert in this area, so we have been reluctant to move too quickly. But we continue to have conversations with relevant parties. There is a lot of regulatory uncertainty surrounding ICOs, however, so we must move cautiously.

Feinerman: Now we know enough about ageing to defeat our main enemy. Do you agree that first comprehensive rejuvenation panel is not a scientific problem and even not an engineering problem, but a problem of engineering management?

Hudson: I wouldn’t say that there is no science left to do, but as an engineer myself I naturally agree that proper engineering management and program management skills must be brought to bear on the problem of ageing.

Feinerman: One person has said, we get what we ask for. Can we now aim high and publicly claim that our main goal is not additional five years of life but LEV — Longevity Escape Velocity and finally unlimited healthy life?

Hudson: This is a difficult “public relations” problem. Most investors, the scientific community, and the public are not yet ready to embrace the notion of longevity escape velocity. Thus at Oisin we do pitch health span as a primary goal. But personally I don’t believe that you can obtain health span improvements without making significant progress towards LEV. So in the end, I think we get LEV by targeting health span, and we reduce the controversy by doing so.

Feinerman: Some people ask me how to buy your stocks or invest in Oisin. What can you say?

Hudson: We do have a number of private investors (angel investors) who are “mission minded” or “mission focused” and we welcome discussions with qualified investors and firms who share our vision for dealing with ageing and cancer. Accredited investor candidates may contact us at info@oisinbio.com

Feinerman: David Gobel claims that “By advancing tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, we want to create a world where 90-year olds can be as healthy as 50-year olds by 2030.” And I secretly hope that 40 will become new 30 or even 20 by 2030! Can we achieve that — in principle?

Hudson: I certainly hope so! In 2030 I’ll be 80, so I’m looking forward to feeling like I’m 40…

Feinerman: Thank you very much for your amazing answers! That was a real pleasure to talk with such a great man like you. I hope we all will succeed in our goal and will have hundreds, thousands, and — who knows? — maybe even millions years of healthy life!

Hudson: It is kind of you to say so, but I only consider myself fortunate to be working with the really great men and women in the anti-aging community who are doing the real work. I’m only trying to facilitate their efforts and get treatments to the clinic as fast as possible. I don’t know what will be possible in the long term, but anything will be better than letting nature run its course, producing sickness and declining functional health.

Ariel VA Feinerman is a researcher, author, and photographer, who believes that people should not die from diseases and ageing, and whose main goal is to improve human health and achieve immortality.

Message from Ariel VA Feinerman: If you like my work, any help will be appreciated!

What is ageing? We can define ageing as a process of accumulation of the damage which is just a side-effect of normal metabolism. While researchers still poorly understand how metabolic processes cause damage accumulation, and how accumulated damage causes pathology, the damage itself — the structural difference between old tissue and young tissue — is categorized and understood pretty well. By repairing damage and restoring the previous undamaged — young — state of an organism, we can really rejuvenate it! It sounds very promising, and so it is. And for some types of damage (for example, for senescent cells) it is already proved to work!

Today in our virtual studio, somewhere between cold, rainy Saint-Petersburg and warm, sunny Mountain View, we meet a famous person. I hope everyone knows Aubrey de Grey — the man who fell to Earth in order to change our vision of ageing, to fight with and to finally save us from it! For those of you who are not familiar with him, here is a brief introduction.

Dr. de Grey is the biomedical gerontologist who researched the idea for and founded SENS Research Foundation. He received his BA in Computer Science and Ph.D. in Biology from the University of Cambridge in 1985 and 2000, respectively. Dr. de Grey is Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, is a Fellow of both the Gerontological Society of America and the American Aging Association, and sits on the editorial and scientific advisory boards of numerous journals and organizations. In 2011, de Grey inherited roughly $16.5 million on the death of his mother. Of this he assigned $13 million to fund SENS research.

I will not ask Dr. Aubrey de Grey any of those stupid questions that journalists usually annoy him with, about his appearance, overpopulation and so on. Instead, we will talk about science and engineering that will rejuvenate our bodies and allow us to be healthy and live longer (I mean really much longer). Because of the recent breakthroughs in many fields, from bionics and applied physics to molecular biology and regenerative medicine, it can (and, I am sure, will) be sooner than you think.

Interview

Feinerman: Hello, Dr. de Grey!

de Grey: Hi — thanks for interviewing me.

Feinerman: In 2012, I read an article by David Sinclair, where he described reversing the loss of mitochondrial function in old mice cells by using NAD+. I felt this was a major change. The past five years have been remarkable! Now every day I read new articles and news about age reversal. In three years, there has been the creation of a few dozen new bioengineering companies whose main goal is to reverse ageing. Billions of dollars are now invested in this area. I believe we will remember 2016–2017 as the most important years. Do you share this feeling?

Note: The first Phase 1 human ageing reversal trials (GDF, Myostatin) will be in a year or two, and George Church discusses how to affordably rejuvenate the whole body! The first version of human CRISPR/Cas9 was created in 2013, and now it is ready for use. In 2015 eGenesis began to work on pigs for xenotransplantation and now they claim they have created retrovirus-free pigs! In 2016 Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte has reprogrammed cells by using special factors and reverted back the biological clock in live mice. And this is only a tiny fraction of news!

de Grey: Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that there are indeed more and more exciting breakthroughs being made in the lab — and of course I am very proud that SENS Research Foundation is responsible for some of them. But no, in the sense that there is still a terribly long way to go; we need to fix a lot of different things in order to get rid of ageing, and for some of them we are still at a very early stage in the research.

Feinerman: George Church said that his lab is already reversing ageing in mice and that human applications may only be a few years away. He said: “We have 65 gene therapies that are being tested in mice and larger animals. If they go well, we will go straight into human trials.” Church predicts that age reversal will become a reality within 10 years as a result of the new developments in genetic engineering. However, he warns that age reversal at a molecular level doesn’t necessarily mean that everything else rejuvenates. No one knows what age reversal will mean for humans. Anyway, all that sounds very promising?

de Grey: George is exactly right, both in his urgency and optimism, and also in his caution about how much we don’t yet know.

Feinerman: You have really changed the world’s opinion, but now you are behind the scenes. I regularly read about new breakthroughs in the news while I don’t see much about your work, even though research in SENS is more fundamental in general! When I went to the SENS web page, I was wondered how much you do. This seems like an injustice and can it be fixed?

de Grey: Oh, I’m still quite prominent — I’m still doing just as many talks and interviews as ever. If, to some extent, my contributions are now being overshadowed by other people’s breakthroughs, that’s a good thing! I have always said that my goal is to advance the crusade far enough that I can retreat into glorious obscurity because others are doing my job better than me.

Feinerman: For many people, their appearance is as important as their health. When you say that SENS 1.0 panel of therapies can rejuvenate people from 60 to 30, do they look like 30? Or can they look like 30?

de Grey: Definitely yes. When we thoroughly rejuvenate the inside of the body, the outside is the easy part!

Feinerman: Can we now say that biomedical engineering and biotechnology have entered an exponential phase?

de Grey: I think we can just about say that, yes. It’s very exciting.

Ending Aging Revisited

Feinerman: Your famous book Ending Aging was published 10 years ago. Would you like to make a new version?

de Grey: I probably should, at some point, but it’s not a priority, because the overall approach that we described in that book has stood the test of time: we have made plenty of progress, and we have not come across any unforeseen obstacles that made us change course with regard to any of the types of damage.

Note: If you have not read Ending Aging yet, I suggest you to do it as soon as possible, and to be more comfortable with the ideas we are discussing below, I highly recommend you to read the short introduction to SENS research on the SENS Research Foundation web page. Also, if you are interested in recent news and up-to-date reviews about [anti]ageing and rejuvenation research, the best place to look for is the Fight Aging! blog. Finally, if you are an investor or just curious, I highly encourage you to take a look at Jim Mellon’s bookJuvenescence.

Feinerman: You look for bacteria who feed on dead animals to find enzymes capable of breaking glucosepane. Do you consider insects? They can eat nearly everything — and much faster!

de Grey: Nice idea, but we’re looking for a different sort of eating. Insects eat stuff and excrete what they can’t digest, just like us. Bacteria are much more versatile.

Feinerman: Many insects have no special enzymes; instead, they rely on bacteria who do all the work. In any case they are a nice place to look for the enzymes!

de Grey: Yeah, well, not really. Insects have commensal bacteria, yes, but so do we. In general, though, bacteria that are living freely in the environment are more diverse than those in the guts of animals.

Feinerman: How do you find useful bacteria?

de Grey: We are using a “metagenomic” strategy for identifying enzymes that can break glucosepane: we take standard E. coli bacteria, we break one or two of their genes so that they become unable to synthesise one or another chemical (in this case typically arginine or lysine) so that they need to take it up from their surroundings, and then we add random DNA from the environment (which could come from any bacteria, even unculturable ones) and add bits of it to the E. coli. Very occasionally the new DNA may encode an enzyme that breaks glucosepane, and if so, the bacteria will grow even without any arginine or lysine in the environment, if (but only if) we give them glucosepane instead and they break it to create arginine and lysine.

Feinerman: In your book you proposed Whole-body Interdiction of Lengthening of Telomeres (WILT) — the removal of telomerase in all cells in order to prevent cancer and reseed the stem-cell population regularly. Is there any success in that? And wouldn’t it be simpler to use non-integrating telomerase therapy to safely lengthen telomeres, like the approaches developed by Sierra Sciences and BioViva?

de Grey: We are making progress there, yes; in particular we have shown that telomerase-negative stem-cell reseeding works for the blood. However, no, the problem with non-integrating telomerase is that it will extend cancer telomeres just as much as normal cells’ telomeres. I support that research, though, not least because there may be breakthroughs in combating cancer in other ways (especially with the immune system), in which case it would be much safer to stimulate telomerase systemically.

Feinerman: Now we have very precise CRISPR, and removing genes is easier than inserting ones, because you can target the same cell more than once. When we solve the delivery problem, would we be able to apply WILT?

de Grey: It’s being tried, but it is very difficult to make the removal selective.

Feinerman: There is growing evidence that epigenetic changes are highly organized and may be one of the causes of ageing. This allows some researchers to claim that ageing is a programme. It does not matter, however, how researchers see such changes — as a programme or as damage. By restoring the previous epigenetic profile by means of special reprogramming factors, we can turn an old cell into a young cell, and by resetting the profile, we can turn an adult cell into a pluripotent stem cell. Experiments show that restoring the epigenetic profiles of many cells in vivo rejuvenates an entire organism. What do you think? Maybe should we consider epigenetic changes as another type of damage in the SENS model, calling it EpiSENS?

de Grey: We need to be much more precise with definitions in order to answer your question. Epigenetic changes can be classified into two main classes: shift and noise. Shift means changes that occur in a coordinated manner among all cells of a given type and tissue, whereas noise means changes that occur in some such cells but not others, increasing the variability of that type of cell. Shifts are caused by some sort of program (genetic changes to the cell’s environment), so yes, they can potentially be reversed by restoring the environment and putting the program into reverse. Noise, on the other hand, is not reversible. And we have for several years worked on determining whether it happens enough to matter in a currently normal lifetime. We have not got to a definitive answer, but it’s looking as though no, epigenetic noise accumulates too slowly to matter, other than maybe for cancer (which, of course, we are addressing in other ways).

Feinerman: Should we use reprogramming factors to reverse the epigenetic programme?

de Grey: Probably not. There may be some benefits in doing so, as a way to restore the numbers of certain types of stem cells, but we can always do that by other methods (especially by direct stem cell transplantation), so I don’t think we will ever actually NEED to dedifferentiate cells in vivo.

Feinerman: One thing keeps me out of bed at night: the fear that stochastic nuclear DNA damage and mutations may play a big role in ageing. Ten years ago you proposed that most of the cells which have critical DNA mutations either undergo apoptosis, become senescent, or become cancerous. But if mutations are not critical, cells will live, accumulate them — one broken protein here, another one there — and it will finally lead to malfunction of the organ.

de Grey: Don’t worry. These mutations don’t accumulate nearly fast enough to harm us, because they are prevented by the same machinery that prevents cancer for a currently normal lifetime, and cancer can kill us as a result of only one cell doing the wrong thing, whereas non-critical mutations would need to affect a huge number of cells in order to affect the function of a tissue.

Feinerman: If it is proved that nuclear DNA damage and mutations play a role in ageing, do you have something in your pocket? I believe you already thought on that. How will we fix the problem? Maybe, extensive stem-cell therapy (like the proposed Whole-body Induced Cell Turnover)?

de Grey: Right. But they don’t play a role.

Note: Whole-body Induced Cell Turnover (WICT) consists of the qualitative and quantitative coordination of targeted cell ablation with exogenous cell administration so as to effect the replacement of a patient’s entire set of endogenous cells with exogenous cells (of the same quantity and cell type as the ablated endogenous cells they are replacing) derived from human pluripotent stem cells and directionally differentiated in vitro prior to their administration. The idea of WICT was firstly proposed in 2016 and improved in 2017.

The aim of WICT is the removal from the organismal environment of accumulated cellular and intracellular damage present in the patient’s endogenous cells, including telomere depletion, nuclear DNA damage and mutations, mitochondrial DNA damage and mutations, replicative senescence, functionally deleterious age-related changes in gene expression, and accumulated cellular and intracellular aggregates.

Feinerman: What do you think on the WICT? Combined with WILT, it looks like an all-in-one solution when implemented.

de Grey: The general idea of accelerating cell turnover is definitely a good one. It is a bit like the idea of replacing whole organs: if you replace the entire structure, you don’t need to repair the damage that the structure contains. However, also like replacement of organs, it has potential downsides, because evolution has give us a particular rate of turnover of particular cells, and the function of each of our cell types is optimised for that. So it may end up being complicated, with many pros and cons.

Feinerman: While other rejuvenating therapies (excepting, maybe, OncoSENS) are achievable in the near future and don’t involve special genetic surgery, full allotopic expression has a really long way to go. What do you think of the mimic approaches, for example, NMN, which raises the NAD+ level and restores mitochondrial function in a cell?

de Grey: It may help to preserve health a little, but I think it is very unlikely to extend life by more than a year or two on average (and it could be even less than that). But we are working hard to develop better methods of gene therapy that may make allotopic expression practical sooner than people think.

Feinerman: Oh, can you unveil the mystery?

de Grey: Well, basically we are combining two technologies that are both very very safe (in the sense that they have very low incidence of random DNA damage) but they have complementary limitations. One is CRISPR, which can make small changes very safely to a chosen location in the genome but cannot insert more than very small amounts of new DNA. The other is a very neglected system called BXB1, which can insert large amounts but only into a location that does not exist in the mammalian genome. Our idea is to use CRISPR to insert the BXB1 “landing pad” at a good location and then to use BXB1 to insert our chosen engineered genes at that location. We are developing this at the Buck Institute in Brian Kennedy’s lab.

Feinerman: Thank you for your explanation! However, there is a big problem with all genetic therapies. We need to target every cell in the body, and now it is nearly impossible. Our best delivery systems involving adeno-associated viruses (AAV) available today have only 10–50% efficiency. We should honestly admit that we still have no universal instrument for introducing new genes in an adult human. How will you solve this problem?

de Grey: We believe that the approach I described in my earlier answer will achieve a much higher efficiency, and because its lack of off-target effects, it means it can be used at much higher titer.

Feinerman: The main SENS approach is to rejuvenate our own bodies, but also there is a regenerative medicine which involves tissue and organ engineering. Won’t it be easier to print or grow new organs instead of rejuvenating the old ones? Of course, we cannot replace everything, but we can replace some critical parts: we can grow a new heart, liver, muscles, and, indeed, skin.

Note: Tissue and organ engineering is among the most fast-growing areas of regenerative medicine. Engineers have already bio-printed or grown in bioreactors almost all human organs. Now they are used mostly for testing new therapies or drugs. The main problem why they cannot be used for transplantation now is the vascularisation challenge. While engineers can bio-print or grow arteries and big vessels, they are still unable to create the vasculature — the web of tiny vessels and capillaries within the organ. Companies like Organovo pursue this goal and promise to solve it within next decade.

de Grey: That’s absolutely correct. I expect that in the early days of implementing SENS, some organs will be easier to replace than to repair. However, of course, replacing an organ requires invasive surgery, so we will want to develop repair eventually.

Feinerman: You emphasize that stem-cell research is already a well-advanced field, and SENS has not needed to get involved in this area. As far as I know, many stem-cell therapies are for very specific diseases and not for rejuvenation. Or will we get it as a side-effect?

de Grey: As you know, I don’t think that “diseases of old age” should be called diseases at all — they are parts of ageing, so their treatment is definitely part of rejuvenation. A great example right now is Parkinson’s disease — there are several stem-cell clinical trials in progress or in preparation for it.

Feinerman: Do you mean they are parts of ageing like a runny nose and cough are parts of flu? So treating them separately is as foolish as treating a cough without addressing the flu virus.

de Grey: It’s even worse than that. Treating runny nose and cough makes some sense, because the body will get on with attacking the flu virus anyway, and it makes sense to be less miserable during that time. But with ageing, we’re just talking about different parts of a phenomenon that the body does not know how to attack.

Feinerman: What in your opinion will be the order of arrival of rejuvenating therapies?

de Grey: Well, a lot of the stem-cell side of things is in clinical trials already, and removal of amyloid is there, too, in the case of Alzheimer’s. Next on the list will probably be senescent-cell ablation, which Unity are saying will be in the clinic next year, and removal of intracellular garbage for macular degeneration will also be, courtesy of our spinout Ichor. The other three are harder, but they are all chugging along!

Feinerman: There are about twenty various types of amyloids, we can see some success in removing transthyretin and beta-amyloid. What about others? Can we scale success in removing the above two on the others?

de Grey: I’m very confident that the removal of other amyloids can be achieved using more or less the same methods that have worked against those two. The next one on my list would be islet amyloid, which contributes to diabetes.

Feinerman: As far as I know intracellular junk in the eyes is not lipofuscin per se but A2E, oxidized form of vitamin A. Is there any progress in removing true lipofuscin — the more widespread form of intracellular junk?

de Grey: We have funded some preliminary work on that, but it’s still early. The difficulty is that lipofuscin is very heterogeneous, made up of many different components. Our strategy is to target it more like the way we target the extracellular matrix: rather than breaking it down, we want to identify some key crosslinks that are protecting it from being degraded by our existing lysosomal machinery.

Feinerman: Now everyone is obsessed with “ageing biomarkers” and the “biological clock”. Are they valid conceptions? Is it possible to have a single “clock” for the whole body? Maybe can we just use every type of damage as a biomarker and keep it below certain threshold?

de Grey: I agree with you — ultimately, we still need to fix the damage, so there is not much more that indirect proxy measures can tell us. These indirect measures are useful today, though, when we don’t have those repair therapies, because they help us to see what interventions may (slightly) slow down the accumulation of damage.

WHO, FDA, and New Medicine

Feinerman: FDA has a very long approval for new therapies or drugs. What do you think on medical tourism and biohacking as an alternative way?

de Grey: There have always been places with less restrictive regulatory systems for new drugs — medical tourism is nothing new. I think the key thing we should be doing more of is making better use of those who choose to go abroad to get treated: we should make it as easy as possible for them to report on what treatment they received and how well it worked, any side-effects, etc., for a long time after the treatment, so that such information can be analysed and used to guide future research. The people who provide experimental therapies don’t have any incentive to gather such data themselves, so it usually never gets gathered.

Feinerman: Do the SENS Research Foundation or any associated companies hold regular meetings with the FDA to inform them and clear the way for the new rejuvenation medicine? Some components of the SENS 1.0 panel are already in development or clinical trials, and others will arrive during next 20 years. These new coming medicines use completely different, repair-based rather than compensatory, approaches and need different clinical-trials protocol and a whole new health-care paradigm. The transition period has already begun, and we should use it wisely, otherwise the US may become an outsider in the medical world.

de Grey: I look forward to the day when we have such meetings, but that’s a little way off. That’s OK, though, because companies that are pursuing various components of SENS are indeed having such discussions. The FDA and its counterparts worldwide are being kept up to speed.

Feinerman: We already have many amazing results in the lab which can save human lives just now, but the lack of funding and the heavily regulated medical system don’t give them any chance to be in clinics in the coming years. With the current pace of progress, they will already be outdated before clinical trials. Do you think that translational research becomes the bottleneck?

Note: Even though 90% of US deaths and at least 80% of US medical costs are caused by ageing:

These numbers speak for themselves; they are all you need to answer the question of when all of the discussed amazing therapies will be available in the clinics.

de Grey: I think things are improving. The idea of real rejuvenation is becoming more and more accepted. At this point, therefore, I would say that the main bottleneck is still at the earliest stage: the funding for work that is not yet investable.

Feinerman: The current WHO’s agenda is kind of a shame! They know that the fire is coming, but they prepare gasoline to put it out with. Do you agree that the conception of “healthy ageing” is a nonsense? Ageing cannot be healthy because if you are healthy you, well, do not age. The WHO forces people to be more comfortable with ageing instead of fighting with it. They recommend to spend billions to build more nursing houses and buy more wheelchairs instead of investing these money into rejuvenation biotechnology! It’s ridiculous!

de Grey: Well, I think we need to do both things: we need to maintain older people’s quality of life as best we can with the limited tools we have today, and we also need to develop better tools. Terms like “healthy ageing” are indeed double-edged: on the one hand there is, indeed, obviously no such thing, but on the other hand the terminology helps to emphasise that the purpose of all our work is to extend healthspan, with the extension of lifespan being simply a side-effect.

Rejuvenation Research Won’t Fund Itself

Feinerman: When I ask people to donate to SENS Research Foundation, they often say that their a few bucks don’t matter. Of course, they are wrong! Every dollar, even every cent matters! For example, how many people may read this? We assume 10,000. Well, if every of you will donate $50, only $50, per month, it will be over $5,000,000 per year! This sum will double current SENS budget. So, united we can change the world. We cannot and should not wait when governments and big pharma will fund rejuvenation research. (In fact they won’t; they will wait and see the first results.) We can do it ourselves! What can you say to our readers to encourage them?

de Grey: You are saying it really well. One way to say it is to calculate how many dollars it would take to save a life by donating to SENS. I estimate that a budget of $50 millions per year would let us go three times faster than now and would bring forward the defeat of ageing by about a decade. About 400 million people die of ageing in a decade, so that means donating to SENS has a bang-for-the-buck of roughly one life per dollar. No other cause comes anywhere near that.

Feinerman: Another doubt that people usually express is how does SENS Research Foundation do anything meaningful with such a small budget? While NIH and many others have hundreds of millions per year and cannot defeat ageing, SENS has only $5 millions per year. I answer that SENS is a highly efficient organization, goal-directed and result-oriented rather than process-oriented. Everyone can go through the SENS webpage and read last year’s annual report.

de Grey: Thank you! — that is indeed correct. Almost all research that is funded by governments is almost useless, because its effects on health will be tiny. SENS is different because it is a coherent, comprehensive plan for bring ageing under complete medical control.

Note: Unfortunately, I agree with Dr Aubrey de Grey. If you take a close look at NIH or NIA funded work… well… You will find hundreds of publications about obesity, lifestyle, air pollution, and their impact on longevity. Don’t you know that obesity, smoking, and much drinking of alcohol are bad for you? How can this information help us create a new cure against cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, or atherosclerosis? Do we really need another paper on it?

Also you can find many publications about calorie restriction and various genetic manipulations on worms and other model organisms that mimic it. Calorie restriction is everywhere! In the meantime, we have known for twenty years that CR does not work for humans. In 2015, $500,000 was given to projects like “A Large Randomized Trial of Vitamin D, Omega-3 Fatty Acids and Cognitive Decline”. It’s not a joke, it’s a real research work! You can find more here. All that is useless because you cannot use it to produce working rejuvenation therapies. Only a small part of this work is useful in the sense of defeating ageing. Do you know what is the most interesting? It’s all your taxes, all your money! Now you know that.

At the same time really important research projects like work on glucosepane breaker therapy (which will end many ageing pathologies like arterial stiffness, chronic inflammation, hypertension, strokes, and will save many lives) in Spiegel Lab at Yale is permanently underfunded and would be closed last year without financial support from SENS Research Foundation and German entrepreneur Michael Greve. Finally, the cost of implementing the working rejuvenation treatments in old mice would by current estimates be only 1–2% of the Apollo Program. And the same amount of money and time was already spend on Sirtuins which have obviously produced nothing.

Feinerman: Can you say what Project|21 is, why it is so important and how people can help?

de Grey: Project|21 is our name for our appeal to wealthy individuals. We of course welcome donations of any size, but at present it remains the case that most of our income is donated by a small number of wealthy donors, so it stands to reason that we are doing all we can to attract more of those. What other people can do to help is easy — donate what you can, and encourage donations by friends who are wealthier than you!

Note: Project|21 is a new initiative created by SENS Research Foundation to end age-related disease through human clinical trials, starting in 2021, through investment in rejuvenation biotechnology.

Through three new programs, the Bridge fund, The Center of Excellence, and The Alliance Program, Project|21 will deliver the perfect environment for this fusion of opportunity and investment.

$50 million in total funding is required for Project|21, at least half of which will come from the members of SENS Research Foundation’s Group|21. Group|21 will bring together 21 philanthropists, each donating between $500,000 and $5 million. Grants, grassroots efforts, and matching-fund strategies will provide the remaining support. $5 millions was already donated by German Internet entrepreneur Michael Greve. Thank you, Mr. Greve! You are our hero!

Feinerman: Some people prefer to donate not to the whole organisation, but rather to concrete project or lab. Of course, it is not among the most convenient and efficient ways to manage money, but anyway do you consider such an option?

de Grey: Certainly yes. We sometimes have projects that cannot be funded because there is too little “unrestricted” money to go around, but for the most part we are able to make it work, so absolutely, if anyone wants to restrict a donation to a particular project, we are totally happy to work with that.

Feinerman: Now cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies allow completely new and efficient ways for crowdfunding and investment. We can see as various no-name companies easily raise tens of millions dollars via ICOs for clearly doubtful projects. This occurs while really important areas like generative medicine, rejuvenation biotechnology, or bionics are permanently experiencing an acute thirst of money. Do you consider an ICO for Project|21? I believe it perfectly fits into ICO conditions and requirements!

de Grey: It’s definitely important for us, and we are working closely with various people who are experts in cryptocurrencies. Vitalik Buterin, who created Ethereum, is actually a donor. We very much hope to bring in substantial funding via that route.

Human Psychology, Not the Science, is the Key Issue in Defeating Ageing

Feinerman: When I ask people whether they want to live hundreds of years, many of them say, “No”, but when I ask them, whether they want to look and feel like 30, while being 70, they say, “Yes, of course!” I hope, you got my idea: people are afraid of big numbers. People don’t want to live forever; they just want not to be sick forever, even though big numbers logically emerge from not being sick. Have you ever regretted your claims about big numbers and 1000-year lifespans? People usually understand them in the wrong way. Some your colleagues say that without such claims, your ideas would be much more popular.

de Grey: It has always been a difficult decision. Yes, people are afraid of big numbers, and they are really bad at reasoning about the distant future. But the most important thing, in the long term, is that I am saying what I believe to be true and that I can always give very thorough, logical answers to any challenges. If I had gone out in 2005 saying that we could live to 150 with rejuvenation tech, and people had said why not 250, I would not have had a good answer, and people would not have trusted me. In the end it always works best if you tell the truth.

Feinerman: What do you think of 2013 work “The hallmarks of ageing”, which is obviously inspired by your seven types of damage? They look more sophisticated, and harder to deal with. Anyway, does it mean that researches finally demystified ageing and recognised it as a solvable problem?

de Grey: You’re right, it was definitely a reinvention of SENS. It had quite a few mistakes, but the basic idea of divide-and-conquer damage repair is identical. It is not at all more sophisticated; it’s the same. And yes, it means that mainstream researchers have finally accepted that ageing is now pretty well understood and is solvable.

Feinerman: Although biomedical gerontologists are not afraid to speak about ageing any more, as was the case 10 or even 5 years ago, which itself is a very big step, they are still very skeptical — at least publicly — about our ability to put ageing under medical control in the foreseeable future. You know many of them in person. Is it their real opinion? Maybe, face to face, they are more optimistic?

Note: I think that gerontologists should take a lesson from physicists and engineers. When physicists realised that our Sun uses a nuclear fusion reaction, they were excited by the idea to build a fusion reactor. Being full of courage, they started to work and immediately came across many obstacles. Although the reaction itself is very simple, the processes behind it are complex.

However, engineers haven’t given up or said: “We don’t fully understand these processes, so let’s stop working and study the Sun for 100 years.” They continued to work as hard as they could, built many working prototypes, and now we are much closer to commercial nuclear fusion reactor than ever before. And they are full of optimism! If you ask any physicist, whether it is possible to build such a reactor, the answer would be, “Yes, of course!” And if you ask an engineer, “When can we build it?”, he would probably say: “20–25 years, and it can be much sooner, if we have enough funding.” Sounds similar, doesn’t it?

Ageing is the same. But when you ask a gerontologist whether we can defeat ageing, he would likely call you a crazy. Why? They are both engineering problems!

de Grey: Well, maybe some of them are slightly more optimistic in private than they are in public, but really no — the problem is that they are basic scientists, so they are trained not to believe anything for which they do not have direct evidence. They just don’t like to speculate about time frames, even in private.

Feinerman: Yeah. With the current pace of progress, anything beyond 2030 is an uncertainty. However, what I know exactly is that if we want to have something working in 2030, we should work very hard in the right direction right now. So why do many [anti]ageing researchers consciously or unconsciously choose the most inefficient and ineffective way — altering metabolism via genetic manipulations or medications to only slightly possibly modestly slow down ageing — and use that as a proof (!) that we cannot radically extend human health and lifespan? Such an example is ridiculous by itself and nearly impossible in any research or engineering area, except biomedical gerontology!

de Grey: That is not something specific to anti-ageing research. In all research areas, the leaders always think they are right and take a long time to understand radically new ideas.

Feinerman: Maybe that is the reason? Maybe we need to have fewer gerontologists who merely study ageing and more biomedical engineers who repair damage? In other words we should switch our focus from ageing research to rejuvenation engineering. Since ageing is an engineering problem, then from the gerontologists’ point of view it looks like “not my job” to reverse it.

de Grey: Exactly. The main problem is that until “only” 17 years ago, no one had any coherent plan for fixing ageing, so it made sense to carry on treating gerontology as a basic science in which the priority was to discover more about it rather than to manipulate it. And 17 years is not very long in science, so the people who are most senior and influential are still the people who formed their mindset in the pre-rejuvenation era.

Feinerman: Unfortunately, the vast majority of biomedical engineers, those who do actual rejuvenation research, do not want to be associated with any [anti]ageing business and life extension, are not involved in longevity discussions, and usually keep silence. When pressed, they, however, are not very optimistic about life extension. It’s quite surprisingly to hear such claims from cutting-edge researchers, especially from those who recently promised to print or grow all vascularised human organs by 2035 and grow new limbs by 2030. If it is not about life extension, then what is it all about? Why do they behave in such a manner? Because of the pro-ageing trance? Or because they are too specialised and cannot see the whole picture?

For example, cell engineers make predictions as though there will be no progress in bionics, and bionics engineers make predictions as though there will be no progress in cell engineering. Each technology alone will not likely be te game changer, but when combined their impact will be enormous!

de Grey: You’ve got it. These technologies are developed largely independently of each other, so their leaders are largely unaware of how much progress is being made in the other areas. Since SENS is a divide-and-conquer approach, one cannot be optimistic about the overall outcome unless one is informed about all the components. That’s the main reason why I ran the Cambridge conference series starting in 2003, which is being revived in Berlin in March 2018 — to bring the leaders of these fields together.

Feinerman: Thank you very much for your amazing interview! Our conversation was wonderful! I wish you all your wishes come true as soon as possible. When we succeed, I hope we will shake our hands one hundreds years from now, walking along the waterfront of Mars City, which Elon Musk has promised to start to building in 2020s. Ah, and when you meet with him, remind him, please, that we will not be able to colonise Mars until we defeat ageing — because microgravity and cosmic radiation have the same implications on the human organism as premature ageing!

de Grey: Thank you for your support!

Afterwords

We live in the exciting era, The Era of Very Rapid Progress in science and technology — an era when many things which were merely science fiction only five years ago are common now, and things that are no more than science fiction now will be common in next five years. At the same time we live in The Era of Great Uncertainty — an era when our small everyday life decisions may have a huge impact on next several decades. One step to the right — and we may defeat ageing in twenty years. One step to the left — and the whole research areas will stagnate for another twenty years (as occurred in the case of glucosepane research).

New rejuvenation medicine is still very young and fragile, like the first spring flower after a dry and cold winter. In these days it especially needs our support! Even in such relatively advanced fields like stem cell or cancer research, there are gray, underfunded, and under-researched areas we need to care of.

Of course, you wish to know the time frames — when will we defeat ageing? You wish to know, will you personally benefit? Nobody knows. I intentionally did not ask Dr. Aubrey de Grey about the time frames and predictions. There will be no more time frames. Enough. Because they give you an illusion that some good clever guy will do all the work needed, while you may just relax, wait when he finishes, and “live long enough to live forever”. But he won’t! It is too big, too ambitious a project for one person. Now you know — your future is only in your hands. Not “live long enough…” but “work long enough…”! I always say that scientific and technological progress is a function of efforts — not of the time. The only way to get rid of a painful uncertainty and get to the definitive answer is to support meaningful rejuvenation research right now!

How can you help? Well, if you are a researcher yourself, then spend your time and money on the meaningful repair-based approach, which will produce working rejuvenation therapies in the foreseeable future. If you are a businessman — donate money to the SENS Research Foundation and its allies — Project|21, Methuselah Foundation, Forever Healthy Foundation, Life Extension Advocacy Foundation, or directly support research groups. Invest in the associated rejuvenation companies or found your own. If you are a celebrity, then use your fame to give attention to the problem and such research. If you are an ordinary person, well, you can encourage your more influential friends and do almost the same — just scale your abilities!

Some of you may ask: is it real? I hope we gave you enough evidence. Yes, of course, it’s real. Mover, it’s already happening! The right question, however, is whether it is happening fast enough to help us — currently living adult persons. And the answer is, probably, no. Of course, there may (and likely will) be many unexpected breakthroughs, but we should not rely on probability and scientific serendipity when we talk about human lives (especially our own). We should rely on a well-written plan, a reasonable budget and our efforts.

So the next question is, “Can we speed up the progress?” Yes, we can! All we need to do is what Dr. Aubrey de Grey said many times before and what I have just said above — unite against our main enemy and help researchers. But will we? Although people rarely think and behave rationally, I prefer to be cautiously optimistic! See you on Mars!

In an effort to learn more about the historical origins of transhumanism and posthumanism, R. Nicholas Starr began a journey to look at the many topics popular within those communities and retraced them back to art. To continue the research he began to reach out to the artists and scientists at the forefront of exploring this relationship. While he continues to prepare his research for publication, he has decided to release the transcripts from these interviews in hopes to spark conversation and gather even more insight into how the creative mind has shaped our scientific world as we move past the limits of the human body.

R. Nicholas Starr is a multimedia artist, biohacker, researcher, and theorist. With an education in signals intelligence from the United States Air Force, and 20 years of experience creating art and performing music in the U.S. and abroad, he has become a unique voice for the U.S. Transhumanist Movement and American policy.

The second in this series is an interview with Dr. Akihiro Kubota from the Tama Art University, Tokyo, Japan. A special thanks to Phil Harry who assisted with the translations.

Quick note and disclaimer from the translator:

I am not a trained professional translator, and this is my first time translating something of this scope, so it may not be a perfect interpretation of the original author’s intended meaning.

–BEGIN QUESTIONS–

What are the critical processes required to create an artificial intelligence program that turns data into art?

I think what’s crucial is not necessarily whether or not AI can make art, but rather whether or not AI can appreciate art. In art that’s being made today, what is even more important than the work itself, is the context of the work. In this sense artistic appreciation requires making connections between the various contexts of a work. I think the framework of modern AI, (through machine learning and reinforcement learning, etc.) allows for this to be possible.

How would the progression from assisted AI to autonomous AI impact AI’s artistic power?

Because context relies heavily on environment and perception, the new contexts that arise from the perception of an entity that is other than human should lead naturally to the creation of new types of art. Rather than AI creating art for the sake of humans, I think a more important problem is the idea of humans creating art for the sake of AI, and whether or not that is possible.

By continuing research in AI-created art, what conclusions can we draw about sentience and sapience?

As Yuval Noah Harari predicts in Homo Deus, I think the point at which humans become “useless” will be the beginning of a new age. Once we are freed from the concepts of “school” and “labor” (as asserted by Ivan Illich), the original, essential role of the arts could make a revival – in effect, a revival of man’s essential nature. In the art of the “useless class”, proposed by Homo Deus’s new age – that is where the future of mankind resides.

Artificial intelligence is a concept that has its roots in literature and mythology. Now that AI can create its own art, have we created a mutual feedback loop?

The crucial point of Harari’s claim is the separation of “consciousness” and “intelligence” (the “Great Decoupling”) – the idea being that it is futile to attempt to create consciousness in AI. Rather, by unleashing the concept of intelligence from consciousness, this liberation will bring forth great possibilities. In this way I think we should reconsider how we think of intelligence and set it free from the confines of personification and anthropomorphization.

Is it possible to amplify or modify this feedback loop by interfacing AI directly with the human body?

The advancement of mankind and the liberation of intelligence are essentially unrelated. People are going to have to get comfortable living under the assumption that there are types of intelligence that we can’t comprehend. Instead, what we should concern ourselves with is whether or not we are actively inhibiting the evolution of AI.

You previously acknowledged that the human body has the ability to adapt to, and capitalize on, a new bio-interface. With the current interest in neural lace and other cybernetic technology, how do you see humanity evolving after a several generations of use?

In addition to that, I wonder about the human capacity to expand on this ability. As it is, humans alone are endowed with the necessary flexibility and plasticity to do so. Rather than machines conforming to the needs of humans, by attempting to adapt to the machines, and expand our own capabilities, we will shape the future of mankind.

Do you predict our interactions changing with planet and space as a result?

The greatest trait humans possess today is not our individual abilities, but our collective abilities. The emphasis here being on our “quantity” – meaning that the effect we collectively have on the very planet we live on is an inevitability. And we are beginning to see that the limits of our planet are being actualized.

A significant amount of your work focuses on satellite-based data collection. Why do you prefer this point of view?

Art and Science alike are on the cutting edge of new horizons, and constantly reaching into distant frontiers. Living in an age where we have the capabilities to create satellites using “personal technology”, using them to create art seems like a natural progression. So for me, the ARTSAT project is just an extremely obvious artistic endeavour to undertake.

You stated that the DESPATCH probe “composes and encodes poetry reflecting not only the sensor data but the artist’s subconscious personality”. Did the sculptural shape of DESPATCH influence the data collected and final tonal output?

As I said before, when it comes to art, the most important thing is not the creation of a piece of artwork, but instead the aesthetic appreciation or the interpretation of the piece. In terms of DESPATCH, if you had ten different people looking at the same data, they would all interpret it in different ways, and thus give rise to ten separate pieces. And this is true even if the transmission signal’s data is merely background noise.

How can the average person create their own scientific lens to view and create art?

Systems of government, economies, mass media, etc. – these are all man-made concepts. It is essential that we not be seized by these fabricated human perspectives in order to realize our essential nature and reach the limits of human potential. Once we are freed from the restraints of human toil and begin to occupy Harari’s “useless” existence, I think it will be possible and necessary for all people to wrestle with the existential questions put forth by Gaugin in “Where do we come from? What are we? And where are we going?”. It is in this space that the systems known as “science” and “art” will become unnecessary. What is important are “reason” and “intelligence”. I believe many people are already realizing the potential danger of overemphasizing the importance of “emotion” in today’s society, and I think we need to do something about that.

Dr. Aubrey de Grey in this interview explains and advocates for curing of aging, i.e., rejuvenation of the old to become youthful; preventing the youth from being old biologically, and other related points.

Aubrey de Grey is the U.S. Transhumanist Party’s Anti-Aging Advisor. He is a biomedical gerontologist based in Cambridge, UK and Mountain View, California, USA, and is the Chief Science Officer of SENS Research Foundation, a California-based 501(c)(3) charity dedicated to combating the aging process. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Rejuvenation Research, the world’s highest-impact peer-reviewed journal focused on intervention in aging.

This interview was conducted by Why? Radio, a program of the Institute for Philosophy in Public Life. You can also find it here.